Somebody Loves Us All

Paddy Thompson, speech therapist, newspaper columnist, is fifty and happy. His dark period is behind him: a failed marriage, a career crisis. Now he lives with Helena (‘the best thing that ever happened to him’), helps kids with their speech problems, and has moved his mother into the next-door apartment. His life feels sane and settled.

So what are these new signs of upset? One of his clients refuses to speak. Helena is under stress at work. His newspaper column has run out of puff. Paddy buys a bicycle. He feels, with a typical metaphorical flourish, that ‘one of those great wheels of life had begun a revolution’. Then his mother presents him with the biggest challenge of his life. What follows, in this wonderfully expansive novel, takes Paddy deep into the vortex of family love.

The book, boldly and exuberantly, asks large questions about how we express ourselves, not only through speech but also through gesture, action, and silence.

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.