Books published by Victoria University Press

It's 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It's 2019: Charlie's tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions o...f Tommy's first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again. Loop Tracks is a major New Zealand novel, written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum. 'Loop Tracks is an urgent and unexpected novel about freedom and responsibility - about a woman forced to wear her solitary and unsupported choice as a puzzling mistake, and about the very present past that she must face to help her family and herself.' -Elizabeth Knox 'This fictional inter-generational story will speak to a wide readership about the choices that are important for our future.' -Dame Margaret Sparrow
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The world's climate is in crisis and New Zealand is being divided and reshaped by privileged immigrant wealthugees. Thirty-something Alice has a near-genius IQ and lives at home with her mother with whom she communicates by Morse code. Alice's imaginary friend, Simp, has shown... up, with a running commentary on her failings. 'I mean, can you even calculate the square root of 762 anymore?' The last time Simp was here was when Alice was seven, on the night a fire burned down the family home. Now Simp seems to be plotting something. When Alice meets a wealthugee named Pablo, she thinks she's found a way out of her dull existence. But then she meets Pablo's teenage daughter, Erika - an actual genius full of terrifying ambition. She's a Killer is the story of a brilliant and stubborn slacker who is drawn into radical action. It's about what happens when we refuse to face our most demanding problems, told by a woman who is a strange and calculating force of chaos. 'A claustrophobic eco-thriller with a gloriously unreliable narrator, She's a Killer is tense and sharp, and feels unnervingly prescient.' -Brannavan Gnanalingam 'Equipped with an exhilaratingly badly-behaved protagonist, She's a Killer builds from a slice of very strange life into a thriller by way of a succession of stunning comic set pieces. You'll laugh-a lot. And then you'll cry and be really surprised about it since you were laughing so much.' -Elizabeth Knox
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Ginny is feeling lighter and heavier at the same time. She's just learned from her cousin about a devastating genetic inheritance - but the revelation has brought a new logic to her mother's death many years before, and to her mother's love. Leaving her fiance in the dark, Gin...ny flees to Germany to research a novel about the daredevil sea captain Count von Luckner, who was lauded for his courage. 'What was courage anyway?' she wonders. 'Did it rise up out of some kind of counter-pressure?' Navigating transient, hedonistic Berlin on her own, she absorbs the city's tangle of stories as she tries to gather the strength to face her future. Set in 2019 as it turns into 2020, I Laugh Me Broken is a novel about an inescapable past and the complex play between genetic inheritance and the choices that are ours to make. It is, finally, a hard-won love story.
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His research was urgent fifty years ago. Now, it's critical. In the early 1970s, budding Kiwi scientist Dave Lowe was posted at an atmospheric monitoring station on the wind-blasted southern coast of New Zealand's North Island. On a shoestring salary he measured carbon in the ...atmosphere, collecting vital data towards what became one of the most important discoveries in modern science. What followed was a lifetime's career marked by hope and despair. As realisation dawned of what his measurements meant for the future of the planet, Dave travelled the world to understand more about atmospheric gases, along the way programming some of the earliest computers, designing cutting-edge equipment and conducting experiments both dangerous and mind-numbingly dull. From the sandy beaches of California to the stark winters of West Germany, the mesas of the Rocky Mountains and an Atlantic voyage across the equator, Dave has faced down climate deniers, foot-dragging bureaucracy and widespread complacency to open people's eyes to the effects of increasing fossil fuel emissions on our atmosphere.
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Kneel like a prayer full of lynching This is my God-given white 'Savage is as savage does. And we're all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world - outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish w...it, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you'll feel your pulse anew.' -Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2017-19 The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence.
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