The Geometry of Desire

Description

Title: The Geometry of Desire
Author: Linda Niccol
Publisher: David Ling Publishing, Auckland, 2005
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Description:

Love can come at you from all sorts of angles.

These stories know that. A style-obsessed architect discovers it’s what’s on the inside that counts. A man so preoccupied with collecting lets the most precious thing slip through his fingers. A girl’s first experience of falling in love changes everything she thought she knew about the world. A woman comes to terms with infertility. A man tries to swim against the tide of middle-age.

Linda Niccol’s debut collection moves between dark comedy and something quietly devastating — the geometry of the title is precise: desire has shape and angle, it can be almost measured, and it still does exactly what it wants to.

Dame Fiona Kidman — one of New Zealand’s most decorated fiction writers — put her name to it on the back cover: “Linda Niccol’s writing veers between laconic and understated wit, and moments of deep tenderness. Nobody in New Zealand explores the sharp and dark side in the way that she does.”

The cover photograph is by Fiona Pardington — one of New Zealand’s most significant fine art photographers — a close-up of a throat and collarbone from her series “Choker.” It is not the cover you usually find on a short story collection about relationships, and it is exactly right. (And the model is a fave of the bookshop’s editor)

Linda Niccol came to writing later in life. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Her brother is Andrew Niccol, who wrote Gattaca and The Truman Show. Neither of them is the other.

Why We Stock It:

A debut from a Kāpiti Coast writer who explores, as Fiona Kidman says, the sharp and dark side of love in a way nobody else in NZ does. Published by a small Auckland independent press. Out of print. With a Fiona Pardington photograph on the cover.