A Man Melting - Short Stories

Published by Random House New Zealand, Auckland, 2011, 315 pages. Some foxing, yellowing of pages, otherwise good secondhand copy.

A startlingly original collection of short stories that was winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. A son worries he is becoming too perfect a copy of his father. The co-owner of a weight-loss camp for teens finds himself running the black market in chocolate bars. A man starts melting and nothing can stop it, not even poetry. This terrific collection of stories by an exciting new talent moves from the serious and realistic to the humorous and outlandish, each story copying an element from the previous piece in a kind of evolutionary chain. Amid pigeons with a taste for cigarette ash, a rash of moa sightings, and the identity crisis of an imaginary friend, the characters in these eighteen entertaining stories look for ways to reconnect with people and the world around them, even if that means befriending a robber wielding an iguana.