Hoops of Steel: New and Selected Stories

This bright and charming collection spans more than six decades of short stories by New Zealand writer Marilyn Duckworth, now in her ninety-second year.

A traveller loses her notebook in London and finds a husband instead. An elderly woman starts talking to dolls. A man walks away from his wife trapped under a fallen wardrobe. A bride arrives years too late.

Sharp, funny and exacting, these short stories by award-winning writer Marilyn Duckworth showcase the domestic and inner lives of women carving out independence amid zealous friendships, reckless lovers and demanding families.

'Alive with life’s unexpected turns, these zesty stories will give you a boost. They’re in favour of appetite—for love, for sex, for survival. Across a span of sixty years, they remain astonishingly fresh. This book is a beguiling gift.'
—Damien Wilkins, author of Delirious

Marilyn Duckworth was born in Ōtāhuhu in 1935, spent a wartime childhood in England and now lives in Wellington. She is a novelist, poet and short story writer. She has also written extensively for television and radio. Duckworth was the 1980 recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. She won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction with Disorderly Conduct (1984), and her novel Leather Wings was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1996. Her memoir, Camping on the Faultline, was published in 2000, and The Chiming Blue: New and Selected Poems in 2017. She was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature. in 1987 and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in fiction in 2016.

Cover photo: Master1305/Shutterstock
Cover design: Todd Atticus