Book description
Shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Awards, these 25 stories are at once
arresting, moving, funny and full of insight into the human condition.
Being a celebrity impersonator, says Aussie Elton John, is like living
your life as a moon. 'We give up our identity and become just a
reflection of another personality, like the moon having no fire of its
own and being just a pale reflection of the sun when it's not there.'
This collection of stories from master short fiction writer Owen
Marshall is rich with people exploring their identities and how they are
affected by others. There is Patrick, whose life is radically altered by
a random encounter with a killer; widowed Margaret, who faces a new kind
of existence alone; David, who experiences the 'spontaneous and passing
friendship of strangers'; Ian, whose wife's demands for a better
lifestyle lead him to a new career in telephone sex. Set in both Europe
and the Antipodes, these stories will be savoured long after reading.
Owen Marshall is a novelist, short-story writer and poet, who has
written or edited over twenty books to date. Awards for his fiction
include the New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters,
fellowships at Otago and Canterbury universities and the Katherine
Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France. In 2000 he received the
ONZM for services to literature and his novel Harlequin Rex won the
Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction. In 2002 the
University of Canterbury awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of
Letters, and in 2005 appointed him an adjunct professor.
