The Broken Book

Description

At the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival recently, Fiona Farrell was the star of the opening night with her stories of the Christchurch earthquake - this book takes those stories and gives them weight and heft and context. Fiona Farrell's meandering travel book shows how an earthquake can change everything in a flash: the book you were writing, the house you were living in, the thoughts that preoccupied you. The Broken Book consists of four essays about life and walking bookended by a preamble and an afterword and interrupted by 20 poems about the Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath. The poems jolt into the essays like aftershocks, like cracks in the text; they make you pause and reconsider. The Broken Book is funny, timely, deeply personal but never self-indulgent - it shows Fiona's talents as a writer and warmth as a human being.

Fiona Farrell is an award-winning novelist, playwright and poet. In 2006 she held the Rathcoola Residency in Ireland, where she wrote The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (Auckland University Press, 2007), a finalist at the Montana NZ Book Awards. Her most recent novels are Mr Allbones Ferrets (2007) and Limestone (2009), both shortlisted for the International IMPAC Award. Farrell received the New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Fiction in 2007. She lives at Otanerito, Banks Peninsula, but is spending the year in Dunedin as recipient of the 2011 Robert Burns Fellowship.