Aucklanders

by Edmond Murray

A timely and eloquent short story collection

In the tradition of James Joyce’s Dubliners, Murray Edmond brings us Aucklanders, short stories that celebrate lives lived in New Zealand’s biggest city. Through different time-settings, and narrative styles, the tales are variously entertaining, funny, satirical, reflective and tragic. Sometimes they are a little gruesome or absurd. Yet these Aucklanders often feel oddly familiar. Among them we encounter a scared RSA waiter, a Zen sensei who keeps his followers guessing, a shy boy who breaks a neighbour’s hothouse with his shanghai slingshot, a famous drunken artist with a tortured legacy, and a delivery driver with a side hustle. The stories variously evoke the hopeful exuberance of youth and love, the pain of heartbreak and loss, and the ambient excitement of a high school play about to begin.

Aucklanders is utterly human, showing the power of the city’s hidden histories and suppressed alternatives in lives that glow and break with absurdity and longing […] This is a wonderful book of human comedies that show how much hurt can hurtle through nervy humour. The language crackles with love and scorn, revelation and delusion and fate. Aucklanders is a tremendous collection of tales.

-Lisa Samuels

They, the stories and their characters, also tell tales, very good ones, but their remarkable character comes from a kind of social energy, a vivacity and diversity that has the cantankerous life-hum of the many-voiced, multi-cultured city they inhabit and celebrate.

–          Ian Wedde

[Aucklanders] scrutinises the lives of city dwellers and reveals the guilt and conscience uneasily awake under the sheets.

–          Brian Potiki