The Red Queen

In her first collection of stories, Gemma Bowker-Wright leads us into the phases of transition and transformation in people’s lives: a dream job, a rare afternoon between son and father, a man losing his wife to Alzheimer’s, a first snow. Like the Red Queen of Through the Looking-Glass, many of these characters are running hard to stay in the same place, but moving ever forward. Their stories, which echo stories from evolution, ecology, and meteorology, form a deeply perceptive and captivating first book.

Gemma Bowker-Wright is a writer who won the 2010 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition and the 2011 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Competition for short fiction.