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From the author of Delirious, winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, Chemistry – first published in 2002 – is a riveting story about families in crisis.
Jamie, a forty-one-year-old drug addict recovering from surgery, goes somewhere he hasn’t been in years – home, to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely those two, with their access to pharmaceuticals – and their blood ties – will help him. And if that fails, their insomniac mother has various prescriptions rattling around in the cupboards of the old family home.
An old hand at deception, Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other there is Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to go straight and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory.
Fastened hard to small-town New Zealand, Chemistry moves with great force to an unexpected and eloquent conclusion.
‘A work of quietly cumulative power. Wonderfully funny, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and moving.' —Elizabeth Knox
‘Wilkins has managed to do that hard thing in this novel – write about his characters as citizens of a particular place and make that place real, multiple and textured. His clear and beautiful prose and his sinewy grip on narrative make it a joy to read.’ —Lydia Wevers
‘A terrifically good book, so cleverly constructed and managed. It’s a work of real tenderness.’ —Jim Crace
Damien Wilkins is the author of fifteen books, most recently Delirious, winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and Aspiring, winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been long-listed three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers.
Cover: Sarah Wilkins
