Book description
'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and
that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous,
to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' Roza
Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job
each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with
her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful
existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there
will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the
Prime Minister's wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm,
but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of
consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives. Award-winning
writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary
New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. Sharp, moving,
brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at once a
meditation on power and politics, and an intensely humane look at the
choices people make as they struggle, against the odds, to maintain love
and integrity in their lives. 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.
