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Book description

The celebrated author of gentle despair and stylish horror takes a picaresque and light-hearted tilt at prostitution, the Mafia, real estate and the supernatural in this entertaining urban fairytale. Lydia, a gorgeous, blonde of uncertain age, has for several years been the chief entertainer at the Cote d'Azur, a high-class brothel of splendid architecture and decoration. Her sad and disorderly history is explored here in this ironical and richly adverbial novel of the mores and manners of the twenty-first century. The glittering cast of characters includes the viciously untasteful Kevin Crumlatch and his pathetic wife Moira, who spends much of her time reading New Age inspirational literature while wearing dirty slippers. This tongue-in-cheek novel hovers over the home of a group of disconsolate and eccentric ghosts, all former owners of the house, who are deeply upset by untalented flower arrangements, tasteless furniture, domestic disharmony, dislocated shoulders and lack of sex. Shonagh Koeaà  s notable writing career met with early success in a Womanà  s Weekly writing contest, in which (aged eight) she won two guineas. She went on to become a journalist and to win the Air New Zealand Short Story Award (1981), and more recently to write a number of short story collections as well as many novels and a memoir (2007). North & South commented that à  Shonagh Koea has a command of prose, an originality of expression, a sophisticated wit and a richness of imagery, which makes her writing a delight.à  Of the novels, Sing to Me, Dreamer was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards (1995), and The Lonely Margins of the Sea was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction (1999). She has held the University of Auckland Fellowship in Literature (1993) and the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship (1997). Koeaà  s territory is à  the contrast between domestic misery and various forms of withdrawal or escapeà  (The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature), and she has been described à  as addictive as nicotine or coffee à Â- with, perhaps, major withdrawal symptomsà  (Nelson Evening Mail). Poet Alistair Paterson said of Staying Home and Being Rotten, à  This is not merely a good book, but a work of brilliance. It establishes Shonagh Koea as a leading New Zealand novelist and a writer of international significance.à  The Kindness of Strangers: Kitchen Memoirs is a collection of Koeaà  s memories from her various roles as daughter, wife, mother, journalist and novelist, and as such serves as a social history of New Zealand of the past 50 years. Reviewing it in The New Zealand Listener, Graeme Lay called it à  a truly delectable readà  . The New Zealand Herald wrote: à  the ingredients in Shonagh Koeaà  s writing à Â- among them a delicate yet incisive wit, keen perception, irony, and an abundance of sensuous imagery à Â- are good enough to stand alone. Still, the 25 plain and tasty very mid-century New Zealand recipes are skilfully interwoven with the episodic memories they give rise to, and slowly build up a fascinating portrait.à  Sing to Me, Dreamer, originally published in 1994, was reissued in 2009. The new edition includes four short stories, an introduction, and a Question and Answer section about why and how the novel was originally written.