'This is a beautiful and compelling work. The language is magnificent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but I think that the structure is an incredibly adept act of decolonisation.' -Pip Adam, author of Audition and Nothing to See
In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely. Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa it takes flight into surrealism.
A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.
'This is a beautiful and compelling work. The language is magnificent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but I think that the structure is an incredibly adept act of decolonisation.' -Pip Adam, author of Audition and Nothing to See
Romesh Dissanayake (Sri Lankan, Koryo Saram) is a writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work has appeared in The Spinoff, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and A Clear Dawn: An Anthology of Emerging Asian New Zealand Writers. His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Cover illustration: H Y Chai
Paperback
224 pages
H: 210mm W: 138mm