Have this Heart

From acclaimed author Lawrence Patchett, Have This Heart is a compulsively readable story collection about men who are trying to do better.

Whether training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident, the men in Have This Heart are striving for more. They care about their work, even when no one else does, because they know what the consequences will be if they don’t.

Lawrence Patchett’s stories are about men at work and what happens when your life doesn’t let you hide. These are tightly coiled stories, rich with rough talk and fear-sweat and tenderness.

Praise for Lawrence Patchett
‘Patchett lopes easily between reverence and parlour comedy and bushman’s nous. . . The pace is tempered by the forever grind of staying alive.’ —Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff 

‘On the surface, Lawrence’s writing has a rugged, frontier, quality, but underneath, holding it all together, is a delicate web, almost fragile in its nature. There is a rawness on the page that is underscored by a rich emotional intelligence that enables him to capture love and loss.’ —Laurence Fearnley

Lawrence Patchett is a Pākehā writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. His previous books include I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales, which won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in Landfall, Overland, New Zealand Geographic, and in newspapers, and he received the Ursula Bethell Residency and the Todd New Writer’s Bursary. He works as an editor and part-time in the restoration of native forests and wetlands.

Cover painting: Euan Macleod, 2 at cave exit. Reproduced with kind permission.
Cover design: Todd Atticus