THE DECK, by Fiona Farrell (Penguin, $37)
At the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021, in a lecture on the future of New Zealand literature, novelist Stephanie Johnson predicted a “a pandemic of work centring on the coronavirus crisis”. There have been quite a few works of fiction already, and Johnson has just published Kind, a satirical novel about the Covid pandemic.
Now, in her first novel for six years, is a thoughtful, poignant response to our recent experience. Using structure to contemplate chaos, Farrell has found a beautifully sophisticated way to entertain us with the unthinkable.
