SINGULARITY

Charoltte Grimshaw

Random House NZ $32.99

One advantage of being a book reviewer is that sometimes you get to read books before the publication date and that was the case with the new Charlotte Grimshaw title, publication date for which is this Friday, 1 May.

I have to say straight off that I greatly prefer long fiction (novels) to short fiction (short stories). So it is with some reluctance that I turn to short fiction especially when I have so many promising looking novels waiting my attention. Grimshaw however seems to have almost invented a new genre that fits somewhere between the two. This new book is clearly not a novel, but then neither is it a collection of short strories in the traditional sense.

She described her previous collection, OPPORTUNITY, which won for her the 2008 Montana Book Award, as "a single unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters". The same definition could be applied to SINGULARITY. And it is a stunner!

I started reading it at Brisbane Airport yesterday afternoon while waiting for our boarding call and I read it all the way back to Auckland.

I became totally engrossed in the superbly constructed, powerful and diverse stories, so much so that the flight seemed over in no time.

If anything SINGULARITY outshines OPPORTUNITY and with this book the author has clearly cemented her position as one of New Zealand's outstanding contemporary writers.