Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Delirious
A retired cop and a retired librarian face the memories of the son they lost forty years earlier as they prepare for the next stage of life. The novel brings grief, ageing, and the possibility of renewal into a quiet but resonant frame.
Work Information
In the midst of ageing and loss, the possibility of starting again keeps returning.
Mary and Pete are about to move into a retirement village when memories of their son Will, who died forty years earlier, begin to return. Through intimate conversation and dry humour, the novel lets grief, care, and the next stage of life meet in a quietly moving way.
Review Summaries
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Readers value the quiet conversations and restrained narration that let grief emerge gradually. The pace is measured, but many feel that the emotional residue lasts.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Te Herenga Waka Univ Pr
- Published
- 2025-03-14
- Pages
- 311 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 2.54 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781776922086
- ISBN-10
- 1776922085
- Price
- 4849 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered. An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.
Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books, most recently Aspiring, winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been long-listed three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka— Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Putahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao.