Max Gate

It’s 1928 and the world’s most famous novelist, Thomas Hardy, is dying in the upstairs room of Max Gate, the house he built in his beloved Dorset. Downstairs, his high-powered literary friends are becoming locked in a bitter fight with local supporters. Who owns Hardy’s remains? Who knew the great man best? What are the secrets of Max Gate? Nellie Titterington, a maid at the house, narrates this earthy and emotionally-charged novel about a world of ambition, duty, belonging and love.

Damien Wilkins is one of New Zealand’s leading writers. He is the author of the New Zealand Book Award–winning The Miserables, and The Fainter, which was shortlisted for both the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He won a Whiting Writers Award and the 2008 New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize, and, in 2025, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for his novel Delirious (2024). He is the Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.