'Peninsula achieves that incredible thing that great storytelling can do – it creates myth and art about a place and a time, creating layers in our reality, giving it murkier and more meaningful depths.' —Josie Shapiro, Kete Books
There's Di, waking up in hospital, feeling scrubbed raw. Ritchie and Willy, toasting their dead friend with ginger beer. Kiri, frantically searching for a lost child. Ember Eyes, with his goat and his too-powerful gun. Rachel clambering up a cliff face. Ellen and her friends bashing through the bush.
Loosely centred on three generations of the Carlton family and told with restrained lyricism, Peninsula is a set of ten interwoven stories about the lives of an ordinary rural Northland farming community over decades of change.
It’s a community populated with stoic, fierce characters who brim with feeling, embroiled in rich and complex relationships with the land, and with one another. Though it is full of the familiar – peacocks, thistles, tramping huts – it is also a place of dreaming.
Sharron Came works as an energy analyst in Wellington. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, winning the 2021 Adam Foundation Prize for Peninsula, which is her first book.
Cover painting: Sonja Drake, Winter Walking with Charlie, courtesy of the artist and Railway St. Studios
Paperback
256 pages
H: 210mm W: 138mm