Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall
Book cover for Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall Photo: Penguin Random House nz
Owen Marshall's Return to Harikoa Bay is a collection of 33 short stories, a selection of which you will find below.
"New work from the master of the short story".
The stories in this collection demonstrate Owen's mastery of craft, they are often funny, sad and wry, with a dark and subversive streak. Marshall's characters are perfectly drawn, whatever age or gender. You get to know them quickly and appreciate their quirks as human beings.
Surely no other New Zealand writer has had such a reach or put so much of our particular, doggy little lives into the context of the human condition. And surely none has been quite so comfortably at home as he is in the place where they live, or for whom it is such a natural thing to write about it. So much of our writing has been about outsiders; Marshall’s interest is in the rest of us, and in the outsider each of us anywhere in the world conceals in order to feign normality from day to day. Where KM found her art by leaving New Zealand, Marshall has discovered his by staying home and writing about it. He has never lived anywhere else; he has learned the trick of standing upright here – here: just a Kiwi, just a Kiwi writer. He is us, though we are not quite him: he is bigger than that. Read him wherever you are, though, and YOU ARE HERE.
Patrick Evans
