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Survival, friendship, love, desire, pain, freedom.
Jess is the only one in her group who hasn’t lost her virginity. Genevieve is being held captive in a dug-out with her gymnastics nemesis from 40 years ago. At night, Jade absorbs catcalls like Mario powering up on mushrooms. From heaven, the Dream Team data-analyses human destinies while worrying about their job security. As Whetū and Sia race to the hospital in the rain, Whetū remembers another night that changed everything.
This is a collection of stories about women in past, present and future Aotearoa. Michelle Duff’s cast of hungry teenage girls, top detectives who forget to buy milk, frustrated archivists, duplicitous real estate agents, and ‘surplus women’ are all as vivid as wafts of Impulse from a backpack in the 90s. These stories move nimbly from realism to comic overdrive, from the outlandish to the simply true, with characters reappearing from new angles. As they meditate on power and patriarchy, love and bad decisions, these stories remind us of the sweet dreams we used to have and how it feels to wake up from them.
‘Vibrant, eclectic, sharp as hell. We’re in the presence of a writer who is acutely aware of the way each story whispers to another – especially, crucially, around what girls and women leave chronically unsaid, the surplus silence in our lives.’ —Tracey Slaughter, author of The Girls in the Red House Are Singing
‘The characters are unforgettable. This is a voice I am happy to spend time with, a voice that is offering something new.’ —Tina Makereti, author of The Mires
Michelle Duff is a journalist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She was the winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her journalism has appeared in Aotearoa and internationally, including in the Guardian, Stuff, New Zealand Geographic, the Melbourne Age and the Sunday Times.
Cover photograph: Tia Ranginui
Cover design: Johnson Witehira
