Andrew Dean, twenty-six, the author of "Ruth, Roger and Me", an exciting new talent.

Young New Zealand voices writing at length on contemporary issues, with eloquence and intellectual facility, are rare. Andrew Dean, twenty-six, the author of Ruth, Roger and Me, is an exciting new talent. With this addition to the BWB Texts series, Dean, a Rhodes Scholar from Canterbury, studying for a doctorate in literature at Oxford University, has taken time out to write a compelling conversation starter on the question of what it means to be young in New Zealand today. It is a New Zealand in which housing affordability, inequality, unemployment, and indebtedness cast lengthening shadows. ‘I wanted to tell the story of our “inheritance” – after three decades of reform,’ says Dean. ‘For so many of us, the circumstances in which we find ourselves are social phenomena without history.’ He joins a set of young writers and thinkers increasingly unwilling to accept at face value the status quo of free-market orthodoxy, insistent individualism and the continued devaluation of civic endeavour.  More Ruth, Roger and Me by Andrew Dean Bridget Williams Books