UPCOMING EVENTS
27 JULY
Scorpio Books, Christchurch launch
15–18 AUGUST
Southland: Storylines Schools
28 AUGUST
Auckland Writers Festival: Middle Fiction Workshop
3 SEPTEMBER
WORD Festival, Christchurch
6 NOVEMBER
VERB Festival, Wellington
12-13 NOVEMBER
Queenstown Writers Festival
EDDY, EDDY
Eddy, Eddy is a coming of age story, a love story, an earthquake story and a story of finding your way back from grief.
Eddy Smallbone (orphan) is grappling with identity, love, loss, and religion. It's two years since he blew up his school life and the earthquakes felled his city. Home life is maddening. His pet-minding job is expanding in peculiar directions. And now the past and the future have come calling - in unexpected form.
As Eddy navigates his way through the Christchurch suburbs to Christmas, juggling competing responsibilities and an increasingly noisy interior world, he moves closer and closer to an overdue personal reckoning.
Eddy, Eddy is a richly layered novel, deftly written with humour and pathos: a love story, peopled with flawed and comical characters, both human and animal; and a story of grief, the way its punch may leave you floundering - and how others can help you find your way back.
Loosely mirroring A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Eddy, Eddy revels in language's stretch and play, the blessings of story and songs, and the giddy road to adulthood.
'Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways - sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong - that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens.' Ursula Dubosarsky
'Lock your doors, put your phones on silent, and enjoy losing all track of time when you're introduced to Eddy and his complicated, endearing, off-beat world.' Emma Neale
'Eddy Eddy is sublime: so subtle & beautiful.' Carole Beu, Women's Bookshop
RECENT REVIEWS
PADDY RICHARDON
NEWSROOM
28 July 2022
Eddy, Eddy is a love story, and a coming-of-age story. As well, it’s a reminder of the importance of recalling the past and facing past griefs. Eddy’s final revelation is shattering but it’s also redemptive. Subtle, intense, very funny and very sad, this is a richly layered novel written with elegance, style and love.
JESSIE NEILSON
KETE
July 2022
Eddy is whimsical and well-meaning, and his personality, imagination, and wordplay (if ostensibly reluctantly inherited), set the tone of the book. Even as he is grieving, his light-hearted bubbliness bursts through where he is content to be "dog-adjacent" but not fully involved. He observes the wreckage of post-earthquake terrain, trying to be cheery. The cathedral is a "still life of vomited stone.” He accepts that his life has "splayed sideways like a spasming limb.”
PAUL LITTLE
NORTH & SOUTH
August 2022
extract
At one point, Eddy feels “briefly giddy at the thought of all the personalities that would be in the room, relationships old and new, the latent combustion”. It’s a good description of the book itself. Is questioning faith something that needs to be done? Does thinking about it have a function in a secular society? As Brain might say, Eddy Eddy proves that it does – irrefragably.