Novels by Stevan Eldred-Grigg
Stevan Eldred-Grigg writes novels about ordinary people more often than remarkable people, and about the world most of us believe to be real rather than the world of fantasy. Yet the tone of his writing can seem not so much realistic as surreal. Often disconcertingly so. He looks at the tastes and smells and sounds and acts and appearances of the world he writes about while at the same time allowing us to wonder whether the words we use are the right words, or indeed if any words can be the right words.
A family jostling inside a rented cottage or flat in a city district, or another family spread out a bit more freely in a mortgaged bungalow in a suburb, can be found at the core of most of his novels. The setting is sometimes Berlin, or Shanghai, or Samoa, or Mexico, but most often Christchurch. At the same time, the Christchurch of these stories is not just Christchurch but Zenith, or Airstrip One, or Mahagonny. The families portrayed in the novels try to make sense of the world by working, slacking, singing, snarling, dreaming, shutting down, feeling hopeless ... while still hoping.
A family jostling inside a rented cottage or flat in a city district, or another family spread out a bit more freely in a mortgaged bungalow in a suburb, can be found at the core of most of his novels. The setting is sometimes Berlin, or Shanghai, or Samoa, or Mexico, but most often Christchurch. At the same time, the Christchurch of these stories is not just Christchurch but Zenith, or Airstrip One, or Mahagonny. The families portrayed in the novels try to make sense of the world by working, slacking, singing, snarling, dreaming, shutting down, feeling hopeless ... while still hoping.
Green Grey Rain (Autofiction), Piwaiwaka Press (Wellington), 2021
Pru Goes Troppo, Piwaiwaka Press (Wellington) 2020
Oracles and Miracles and Zombies, with Helen Mae Innes, Piwaiwaka Press (Wellington) 2020
Bangs, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 2013
Shanghai Boy, Random House (Auckland) 2006
Sheng Xian Qu Ji, Unitas (Taipei) 2005
Sheng Xian Qi Ji, Shanghai Yi-wen (Shanghai) 2002
Kaput! 1stBooks (Bloomington) 2001
Blue Blood, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1997
Mum, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1995
Gardens of Fire, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1993
The Shining City, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1991
The Siren Celia, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1989
Oracles and Miracles, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland, New Zealand), 1987
Pru Goes Troppo, Piwaiwaka Press (Wellington) 2020
Oracles and Miracles and Zombies, with Helen Mae Innes, Piwaiwaka Press (Wellington) 2020
Bangs, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 2013
Shanghai Boy, Random House (Auckland) 2006
Sheng Xian Qu Ji, Unitas (Taipei) 2005
Sheng Xian Qi Ji, Shanghai Yi-wen (Shanghai) 2002
Kaput! 1stBooks (Bloomington) 2001
Blue Blood, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1997
Mum, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1995
Gardens of Fire, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1993
The Shining City, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1991
The Siren Celia, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland) 1989
Oracles and Miracles, Penguin New Zealand (Auckland, New Zealand), 1987
Pru Goes Troppo
Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had sex for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia. Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.
‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy in Samoa.
‘I rather think we are, darling.’
‘Oh dear.’
Pru Goes Troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of two people who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent. Among the themes explored in the story are class, gender, colonialism and neo-colonialism, ageing and belonging. And pratfalls.
ISBN 9780473538750
Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had sex for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia. Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.
‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy in Samoa.
‘I rather think we are, darling.’
‘Oh dear.’
Pru Goes Troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of two people who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent. Among the themes explored in the story are class, gender, colonialism and neo-colonialism, ageing and belonging. And pratfalls.
ISBN 9780473538750
Oracles and Miracles and Zombies
We all know about the zombie pandemic that ravaged New Zealand between the two world wars, but little has been written about how the zombie virus affected the lives of women, especially working class women. Stevan Eldred-Grigg's best selling novel about twin sisters growing up during the depression has been updated by Helen Mae Innes to include the previously ignored and despised minority, zombies.
A black comedy, the story shows us how the sisters, their sharp and shrewd mother and many other women struggle to avoid being bitten by biters, care gingerly for hunches who don't want to eat their brains (yet) and watch as the 'cured' lurkers start to take their jobs. Even in times of pandemics girls still grow up, worry about boys, go out to work, get married and have babies, all while trying to keep their brains safe inside their skulls. At the beginning the twins are small, fearful and helpless. By the end of the story they're armed and ready to go after the enemy.
But who is the real enemy?
A novel about survival in extraordinary times, Oracles and Miracles and Zombies is an inspiration to women of all generations.
We all know about the zombie pandemic that ravaged New Zealand between the two world wars, but little has been written about how the zombie virus affected the lives of women, especially working class women. Stevan Eldred-Grigg's best selling novel about twin sisters growing up during the depression has been updated by Helen Mae Innes to include the previously ignored and despised minority, zombies.
A black comedy, the story shows us how the sisters, their sharp and shrewd mother and many other women struggle to avoid being bitten by biters, care gingerly for hunches who don't want to eat their brains (yet) and watch as the 'cured' lurkers start to take their jobs. Even in times of pandemics girls still grow up, worry about boys, go out to work, get married and have babies, all while trying to keep their brains safe inside their skulls. At the beginning the twins are small, fearful and helpless. By the end of the story they're armed and ready to go after the enemy.
But who is the real enemy?
A novel about survival in extraordinary times, Oracles and Miracles and Zombies is an inspiration to women of all generations.
Oracles and Miracles
Oracles and Miracles tells the story of Ginnie and Fag, two girls wishing and hoping, hurting and joking, while growing up in poverty. One of the bestselling novels ever published in New Zealand, it is widely loved by readers and has been incorporated into the syllabus for secondary schools and university. Oracles and Miracles also has been adapted both for stage and radio, playing on Radio New Zealand, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Central Broadcasting Company, Taiwan. ‘When we were kids,’ writes Fag, ‘Ginnie and I invested our lives with a sort of dark, eternal significance … we thought, This is Our Place of Suffering.’
Lauris Edmond: 'I don't remember reading another novel that has given me such a strong sense that the significance of life has to be fought for through its everyday trivialities.'
Michael King: 'its technique is innovative; it is understatedly dramatic, believable and moving.'
Andrew Mason: 'rich, warm and dark, complex, layered and subtle.'
Judith Brett: 'I find it hard to think of a contemporary Australian novel which treats the complex and contradictory relations between work, sexuality, family life and class in as sophisticated and unromantic a way.'
Oracles and Miracles tells the story of Ginnie and Fag, two girls wishing and hoping, hurting and joking, while growing up in poverty. One of the bestselling novels ever published in New Zealand, it is widely loved by readers and has been incorporated into the syllabus for secondary schools and university. Oracles and Miracles also has been adapted both for stage and radio, playing on Radio New Zealand, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Central Broadcasting Company, Taiwan. ‘When we were kids,’ writes Fag, ‘Ginnie and I invested our lives with a sort of dark, eternal significance … we thought, This is Our Place of Suffering.’
Lauris Edmond: 'I don't remember reading another novel that has given me such a strong sense that the significance of life has to be fought for through its everyday trivialities.'
Michael King: 'its technique is innovative; it is understatedly dramatic, believable and moving.'
Andrew Mason: 'rich, warm and dark, complex, layered and subtle.'
Judith Brett: 'I find it hard to think of a contemporary Australian novel which treats the complex and contradictory relations between work, sexuality, family life and class in as sophisticated and unromantic a way.'
Bangs
Meridee Bang is a perky kid elbowed by a throng of brothers and sisters inside a tiny house in one of the wrong suburbs of Christchurch. Nothing in her life comes easy. Wally her dad, known for poor puns, works at a plastics factory. Gwendolyn her mum, feckless, fierce and funny, broods in her kitchen or lashes out at the kids. The kids swap jokes and smart talk while crowding one of a row of standardised bungalows. Vinyl. Chrome. Acrylic. Meridee hopes that one day she will be rich and pretty like the heroines of The Patty Duke Show.
As Meridee dances the frug through the swinging sixties, stalks on stacked heels through the seventies and goes for glam in the early eighties, she uses every weapon she can to find the life she wants. But are cleverness, pluck and ambition enough to break free from greasy-walled Olivine Street?
Bangs takes the reader back into the big blowsy family at the centre of Oracles and Miracles and its companion novels Mum and The Shining City.
Stephanie Johnson: 'Bangs is confessional, sad, true, lit with gallows humour and could only have been written in New Zealand.'
John McCrystal: 'Gwendolyn is a superbly drawn character … few Kiwi novels can claim to have been underpinned by such a mastery of New Zealand social history.'
Meridee Bang is a perky kid elbowed by a throng of brothers and sisters inside a tiny house in one of the wrong suburbs of Christchurch. Nothing in her life comes easy. Wally her dad, known for poor puns, works at a plastics factory. Gwendolyn her mum, feckless, fierce and funny, broods in her kitchen or lashes out at the kids. The kids swap jokes and smart talk while crowding one of a row of standardised bungalows. Vinyl. Chrome. Acrylic. Meridee hopes that one day she will be rich and pretty like the heroines of The Patty Duke Show.
As Meridee dances the frug through the swinging sixties, stalks on stacked heels through the seventies and goes for glam in the early eighties, she uses every weapon she can to find the life she wants. But are cleverness, pluck and ambition enough to break free from greasy-walled Olivine Street?
Bangs takes the reader back into the big blowsy family at the centre of Oracles and Miracles and its companion novels Mum and The Shining City.
Stephanie Johnson: 'Bangs is confessional, sad, true, lit with gallows humour and could only have been written in New Zealand.'
John McCrystal: 'Gwendolyn is a superbly drawn character … few Kiwi novels can claim to have been underpinned by such a mastery of New Zealand social history.'