Winner of the ATB | ITK 2023 award for a hybrid collection.
Launching August 17 at Time Out Books in Auckland!
Published by AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU
atthebay.org/books
Enquiries: info@atthebay.org
About the book
This collection delves into relationships and their beginnings, middles and ends, how one person relates to another or to many others in circles of intimacy and exclusion. An obsession with an internet stranger or with the one who got away. Asserting ownership over a lover or watching, helpless, as they recede on a mysterious tide. Relationships that stagnate or explode, that fail to launch or simmer with jealousy, desire or unrequited longing. Workplace and family skeletons. Explorations of artificial procreation and motherhood. In Wilson’s hands prose, poetry and translation hybridise at unexpected intersections and dance in surreal meta-landscapes.
What people are saying
Addictive. The best kind of experiment; an ambitiously hybrid and surreal work
– Jen Calleja, author of Vehicle and I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For
Fiction at its most inventive
– Ellie Kivinen, Writers’ Café Auckland
Wilson merges original work with translations, poetry with prose, social realism with science fiction and futuristic narratives. This collection showcases the strange and beautiful things that can happen when genre boundaries are crossed and narrative conventions are pushed to their limits. Familiar becomes unfamiliar; ordinary activities take on extraordinary or even terrifying qualities. The biological realities of parenthood are examined from many angles: at times poignant, at other times deeply creepy. There is an unrelenting interrogation of stories, of language itself, and of human relationships. This is a wide-ranging and consistently fascinating work.
– Airini Beautrais, author of Bug Week & Other Stories and The Beautiful Afternoon
An arresting, exhilarating, unstable bricolage – sometimes dystopic, sometimes chick lit-ish, sometimes futuristic, sometimes topically issue-driven and sometimes socially realistic: its deft zigzagging between genres offers true hybridity
– David Eggleton & Harry Ricketts, At the Bay | I te Kokoru competition convenors
An excerpt
One to many
His email had said:
‘Unfortunately, I will only be able to meet you once.’
He hadn’t provided a photo, although she had sent hers.
She waited in front of the station exit, biting the inside of her right cheek – it was already raw. She scanned the male faces around her with a dizzy certainty. I’m too early, she thought. Whatever – it’s not like meeting someone for a date.
In her ears, a distant roar was approaching. Is this what it’s like to pass out? – but up in the blue, there it was: a glint of metal wings. Nothing personal. She was one person on the ground, looking up at a plane, caught in a surge of others.
She had re-read his email so many times. It went on:
‘There are hundreds of you, I’m told.’
From a distance, she was a dot on the ground among others just like her, devoid of meaning. An abstract good, not an individual. A product, so easy to create. She saw how a plane could drop bombs: the abstract many had a weaker claim than the one. In this case she was the many; like it or not, she always would be.
That email again, a niggling earworm: ‘I want to ensure I can offer the same amount of contact to everyone who applies for my information.’
Fair. As the clinic said, he could reflect with pride that he had anonymously ‘helped so many family wishes come true’. He had ‘given the gift of life’. He was ‘not responsible for the children created in any way.’
She had been the gift so generously given: one of many packages tossed out of a plane, for ten dollars a pop. She should be grateful. She was lucky he’d agreed to meet at all.
That email: ‘My time is limited.’
True. Nothing personal. So was hers. She had searched for years, after finding out the truth as an adult. Who wouldn’t want to know who their biological father was? The origin of the blueprint written in the cells of their body. Heritage and ancestry.
A complete medical history? People have died for lack of one: because they were lied to about their parentage and didn’t know they were at risk for hereditary conditions. Her teeth clenched until she tasted blood.
One awkward meeting? Even when he didn’t want to know her?
Yes.
She had one biological father; one life to live. A childish singsong: You get what you get and you don’t get upset. The plane had disappeared.
There he was now, rushing along; biting the inside of his right cheek. Their eyes met – she saw his familiarity, which instantly lent new sense and meaning to her own reflection, but also how familiar she was to him, how familiar this situation – how he could treat her with detachment, like a stranger.
The email concluded: ‘I wouldn’t be able to sustain a relationship with you: it wouldn’t be fair to your brothers and sisters.’
– first published in Landfall
Pre-order the book!
Pre-order by email/ send query to: info@atthebay.org
Books available at the launch and via shipment from online order.
Born and raised in Kirikiriroa, Sharni Wilson is an award-winning writer of fiction and a Japanese-to-English literary translator. She is the translator of Swan Knight by Fumio Takano (Luna Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Landfall, World Literature Today and The Malahat Review, among others. One to Many and other experiments is her first book.
See the 2024 winners of the inaugural manuscript awards for flash fiction, short story and hybrid collections from AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU here: atthebay.org/books