Another memorable effort from Kiwi author

Reach,

by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, RRP $38):

Successful artist Quinn lives with Marcus, who left his wife for her and subsequently lost contact with his young daughter as a result of that breakup.

Quinn is busily preparing for an upcoming exhibition, but as the deadline for her exhibition approaches, Callum, a deep-sea diver with a love of the ocean, enters their lives. As the exhibition date draws near, challenges emerge that force each of them to make choices and test their loyalties.

In the end, those challenges will have far-reaching consequences.

As always, the author has managed to pack powerful and believable emotions into one little paperback. Laurence Fearnley is one of those writers who manages to quietly get under your skin: her stories are deceptively short, and decidedly complex.

Dunedin-based Fearnley has won many well-deserved accolades for her skillful writing. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards and was shortlisted for the international 2010 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing. Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana Book Awards. In 2004, she was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago.

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