Delirious – Damien Wilkins

Description

Author: Damien Wilkins
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
ISBN: 978-1-77692-208-6
First published: 2024
Edition: Reprint, 2025

In brief

What happens after everything? After careers, after children, after grief has settled into the furniture? Delirious is a tender, sharply observed novel that tracks two older New Zealanders navigating love, loss, and the shadowy landscapes of memory.

About the book

Pete is a retired librarian with a heart condition. Mary, his wife, used to be a cop — now she’s haunted by old injuries, physical and emotional. They’ve sold their house and moved into a retirement village, trying to make peace with the long, strange arc of their lives.

But nothing sits still. Pete is fixated on the death of his mother, who succumbed to a kind of madness late in life. Mary is pulled back into the unsolved case of their son Will, who died decades ago in what was ruled an accident. A call from a detective changes everything — or at least, reopens the door to what was once closed.

Wilkins handles this domestic mystery with a poetic realism that’s utterly his own. The tension doesn’t come from action but from quiet recognitions, long silences, the ache of wanting something to be true — and not being sure if you’d survive it if it was.

This is not a crime novel, though there is a crime. It’s not a love story, though it aches with love. Delirious is instead a novel about how we carry the people we lose — and what happens when they don’t stay where we’ve left them.

Reviewer praise

“A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? Delirious is a marvel of a book.” — Witi Ihimaera

“An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing… Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face.” — Te Herenga Waka University Press

“Sharp, intimate, and quietly devastating.” — Booksellers NZ

“Wilkins captures the fragility of later life with wisdom and wit.” — ReadingRoom

“Every word is measured, weighted. You’ll think about this one for days.” — Goodreads reviewer