Nineteen Widows Under Ash

Nineteen Widows Under Ash is the third novel by acclaimed New Zealand author Damien Wilkins.

Evelyn has left her home and her husband. She has taken her thirteen-year-old daughter two thousand miles across the USA to her childhood home. The drizzly Pacific Northwest suits Evelyn's mood perfectly. She takes small doses of liquor from a secret supply and spends her time smoking under wet trees in the company of a hen. But her home town has more on its mind than Evelyn's troubles. The volcano that sits on the horizon has suddenly become active. Scientists, tourists, thrill-seekers flood the district. Evelyn tries to ignore it. She cannot, however ignore the phone calls she starts receiving following a car accident. Who is the caller? What does he want?

'A meditation on the big issues, life and death, written with an austere elegance this is, simply, a wonderful book.' —Michele Hewitson, NZ Herald

Damien Wilkins is the author of many novels, including Aspiring, winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020, and Delirious (2024), winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been longlisted three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers.