Book description
A prize-winning and innovative collection of connected short stories.
"You could look back after a long time and ask, who wanted what
from whom?" A man confronts death after an operation, a devout
Christian encounters a man who hurt her long ago, a secretary uncovers
her boss's secret shame. And in a house in Auckland an elderly woman is
writing the last book of her life, one which, she says, contains all of
her crimes. How are the characters connected and who is writing the
stories? Each of these astute stories is an inspection of motive, rich
in vivid insight into a diverse range of lives. Together, they form a
unified whole. Opportunity is a book about storytelling, about
generosity and opportunism; above all it is a celebration of the
subtleties of human impulses, of what Katherine Mansfield called the
LIFE of life. Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of five critically
acclaimed novels, Provocation, Guilt, Foreign City, The Night Book and
Soon. In 2000 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship.
She has been a double finalist and prizewinner in the Sunday Star-Times
short story competition, and in 2006 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield
Award. In 2007 she won a Book Council Six Pack prize. Her story
collection Opportunity was short listed for the 2007 Frank O'Connor
International Prize, and, in 2008, Opportunity won New Zealand's premier
Montana award for fiction, along with the Montana medal. She was also
the 2008 Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection,
Singularity was short listed for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International
Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth
Writers' Prize. The Night Book was shortlisted for the NZ Post Awards in
2011. She writes a monthly column in Metro magazine, for which she won a
2009 Qantas Media Award. She lives in Auckland.
