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Newsroom's Best Book of 2024
It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee.
Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered.
An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.
'A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.’ —Witi Ihimaera
'This is just a beautifully powerful, wonderful book.' —Pip Adam, RNZ
'Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.' —Elizabeth Knox, The Conversation
‘Delirious by Damien Wilkins is a beautiful work of fiction and if it reduces you to tears then you will not be alone. . . . The book of the year is all heart.’ —Steve Braunias, Newsroom
'A charged book . . . Delirious is an accurate and sympathetic study of change, age and growth. Set on the very edge of land, the novel is poised between rational assessment and the mysteries of the deep.' —David Herkt, NZ Listener
‘There’s so much poetry and beauty in this book . . . I have a very tender heart and it feels stronger for having read it.’ —Gabi Lardies, The Spinoff
‘I found it amazing that a book about traumatic events was also so funny, and even at times whimsical. . . . I like it when a novel reflects life so closely and this novel is so close to life it’s almost psychedelic with it: so much detail, and beauty and harshness and weirdness.’ —Claire Mabey, The Spinoff
‘Ageing may not be seen as the most glamorous topic, but this smart and sensitive novel proves it to be rewarding, if rare, territory. Delirious teaches us that there is always more to learn from the past—personal, pre-colonial—and that ageing is a perilous, precious privilege.’ —Claire Travaglia, Kete Books
Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books, most recently 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 design: Sarah Wilkins
