Golden Deeds

Description

Title: Golden Deeds
Author: Catherine Chidgey
Publisher: Victoria University Press, 2000
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good – slight discolouration to pages. (Book design is purposefully weathered)

Description:
Colette receives a letter from “The Friends of Patrick Mercer.” She has no idea who Patrick Mercer is, or why she is being written to about a man lying unconscious in a hospital on the other side of the world. That’s the question Golden Deeds opens on — and the novel spends the rest of its pages asking something larger beneath it: how do lives connect across distances and decades that should, by rights, make connection impossible?

Patrick lies in his coma, rebuilding his life in memory and dream. Colette is new to a city and trying to make something of it. Ruth and Malcolm are picking up the pieces after the mysterious disappearance of their daughter Laura. Chidgey moves between them with the precise, unhurried patience of someone who knows exactly where all the threads are going — and the reader has to do the work of finding them, which is the point. This is a novel about the human compulsion to make things connect, enacted structurally: you piece the narrative together the same way the characters piece their lives together.

Time Out London chose it as Book of the Year. The Times Literary Supplement called it “reminiscent at times of darkest Atwood” and “a witty and melancholy alchemy of heat and chill.” The New York Times Book Review named it a Notable Book. The NZ Dominion called it “immensely readable, beautifully written, rather profound.” It was also serialised by Radio New Zealand — a marker, in this country, of something genuinely worth the time.

Why We Stock It:
The second novel that confirmed Catherine Chidgey was not a one-book wonder. Out of print in its original edition, quietly sought after — and in a country that too often forgets its own literary history, worth keeping on a shelf where people might find it.