My Mother and the Hungarians And Other Small Fictions

In this new collection of flash fiction from Frankie McMillan, family relationships and the experiences of refugees in 1950s New Zealand are explored through exaggeration, humour, and surreal eddies of simile and metaphor that broaden the pieces out to look askance at politics, culture and history. These compressed, often comic, capsules of narrative convey a rich sense of family connection, of the lives of Hungarian immigrants to New Zealand and also of a child’s evolving self-awareness in a fractured, yet still enchanting, world.

Frankie McMillan is the author of The Bag Lady’s Picnic and other stories (Shoal Bay Press, 2001) and two poetry collections, Dressing for the Cannibals (Sudden Valley Press, 2009) and There are no horses in heaven (CUP, 2015). Her work was selected for The Best New Zealand Fiction anthologies in 2008 and 2009 and for Best New Zealand Poems in 2013 and 2015. In 2009 she won first prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. In both 2013 and 2015 she was the winner of the New Zealand Flash Fiction Award. Frankie McMillan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Todd New Writers’ Bursary in 2005 and held the Ursula Bethell residency at the University of Canterbury in 2014. She currently teaches at the Hagley Writers’ Institute.