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1987
Welcome to the Happy World Hotel!
Gina Tully – amateur acrobat, woman of conscience and manager of a bottom-of-the-cliff residential hotel – has to balance her ideas about how the world should be with her need to keep her job, as the economic reforms of the mid-1980s start to tell on society's most vulnerable. But Gina – confused, bold, sly – journeys beyond the merely political, and what emerges is a celebration of human resilience and the need for intimacy and compassion.
First published in 1987, Nigel Cox's celebrated second novel was shortlisted for New Zealand's two major book awards, won the Buckland's Memorial Literary Prize, and was optioned for film.
'With its stink of life, its compassion and vitality, its vivid gallery of rogues, hoons, dreamers and eccentrics, Dirty Work deserves to be read.' —Dominion
'This is an excellent book . Nigel Cox writes simply and directly, with compassion and humour.' —Otago Daily Times
Nigel Cox was born in 1951 in Pahiatua and grew up in Masterton and the Hutt Valley. His early working life reads like an author trying to find his way: advertising account executive, assembly line worker at Ford, deck hand, coalman, door-to-door turkey salesman, driver and bookseller. He worked at Te Papa Tongarewa and the Jewish Museum Berlin. Nigel's published novels are Waiting For Einstein (1984), Dirty Work (1987), Skylark Lounge (2000) and the acclaimed Tarzan Presley (2004), runner-up in 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Responsibility, Nigel's fifth novel, was published to widespread praise in May 2005.
Nigel was diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2005 and he completed his sixth novel, The Cowboy Dog, which was published by VUP in November 2006. Nigel died on Friday 28 July 2006.
