In a Fishbone Church

In a Fishbone Church, winner of the Montana New Zealand First Fiction Award, is a striking debut novel by Catherine Chidgey. Three generations of Stiltons, an ordinary family (like all ordinary families) lead lives of sometimes quiet desperation. Old Clifford has just died: remembered as a devoted man, his passion had been his fossil finds, recorded in his diaries, stowed now unread, under his sons Gene's stairs--diaries that had daily registered his pulse and bowels and also tersely: "Doris 4.30pm, Marsha 7pm". Gene, in his father's eyes a deserter to the South Island, still fishes and hunts and tries to engage his daughters in the ways of the land. Etta, her freezer full of loaves and fishes, feeds, cossets, worries, while their children scrap and grumble through their childhoods until Christina escapes to Sydney and a doctor's life and Bridget heads for Berlin just to get away.

With extraordinary imaginative verve and an assured touch for detail and dialogue, Catherine Chidgey intertwines the abrasions and evasions of generations, of inheritances both wanted and despised and affectingly describes how the touchstones of one generation can be repudiated and refound by the next. --Ruth Petrie


Genre: Literary Fiction