The Wish Child (B Format)

I am the wish child, the future cast in water.

Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Sieglinde lives in middle-class Berlin, where her father censors books, cutting out forbidden words like ‘love’ and ‘mercy’. Erich tends beehives in the countryside near Leipzig, under the shadow of questions no one will answer.

Watching over them is the wish child, an enigmatic narrator whose voice emerges from deep within a shattered nation.

Siggi and Erich find temporary refuge in an abandoned theatre amid Berlin's rubble. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days the children spend here will shape the rest of their lives.

A profound meditation on corrupt ideology and the resilience of the human spirit, this novel showcases Chidgey's ability to find the heart in history's darkest chapters.

'The Wish Child reminds us with grace and understated wisdom of a need to strive for universal good. I ached as I read. This novel is unmissable.' —Paula Green, Sunday Star-Times

'A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist.' —The Times (UK)

'A fiercely determined act of imagining.' —North & South

Catherine Chidgey lives in Cambridge and lectures in creative writing at the University of Waikato. The internationally bestselling author of nine novels, she has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction twice. Following The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy, Catherine’s novel The Book of Guilt (2024) completes a trilogy of novels about twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Cover artwork: Kurt Günther, Portrait of a Boy (1928)
Cover design: Todd Atticus