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In A Fishbone Church is the expansive, deeply moving and multi-award-winning novel that launched Catherine Chidgey’s storytelling to the world.
When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard – but Clifford’s words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family’s world.
Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina – they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood.
First published in 1998, In a Fishbone Church spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan 1990s, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilarating novel.
‘Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent, and In a Fishbone Church marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career.’ —Nick Hornby
‘A beautifully evocative and warm account of family life and history, In a Fishbone Church enchanted me from the first to last page.’ —The Bookseller
‘It is funny. It is supremely touching. It knows magic.’ —The Post
Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize twice for The Wish Child. Her 2020 novel, Remote Sympathy, was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Axeman’s Carnival (2022) won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Catherine’s most recent novel is the critically acclaimed Pet (2023). She lives in Ngāruawāhia and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.
Cover artwork: Australian Black Swan, Paul Margoscy
Cover design: Todd Atticus
