In a Fishbone Church

Description

Title: In a Fishbone Church
Author: Catherine Chidgey
Publisher: Victoria University Press, 1998
Format: Paperback
Condition: Good – discolouration to pages

Description:
When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard. But Clifford’s words have too much life in them to stay buried, and they begin to leak into everything — the way a childhood memory will, or a habit you swore you’d never inherit.

In a Fishbone Church follows three generations of the Stilton family across five vivid lives: from a 1950s Canterbury duck season to the Berlin rave scene, from Clifford’s blunt, bombastic daily entries to his daughters’ quieter, stranger ways of digging into the past. It is a novel about what gets passed down -the things we name and the things we don’t – and how the dead go on shaping the living whether invited to or not.

Catherine Chidgey was 27 when she wrote this. It won Best First Book at the NZ Book Awards, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific), and a Betty Trask Award in the UK. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Nick Hornby called her “a wonderful new talent.” Louis de Bernières said you would be thinking about it long after you finished reading. Landfall praised her “unusually fine emotional register.” The NZ Listener called her “the real deal, the star of her generation” — and she has spent the next 27 years proving them right.
This is where it all started.

Why We Stock It:
Catherine Chidgey is now one of the most decorated writers in New Zealand literary history. Every reader who arrives here via The Axeman’s Carnival or Remote Sympathy will want to come back to where it began – a young writer from Lower Hutt, a Canterbury butcher’s diaries, and a debut that announced something completely new.