Here in Australia, we are often slow to discover great New Zealand authors.(Think: Lloyd Jones, Emily Perkins.) Perhaps our Pacific neighbours are too close to be exotic, but too far to exert the lure of the familiar. Charlotte Grimshaw has been up for (and winning) the top awards in her native New Zealand for years; this year Singularity was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. These interlinked stories are masterful and evocative; their subject matter spanning death, loss, isolation, revenge, and family ties.

In ‘Opportunity’, an undercover cop working a rural drug ring courts danger in more ways than one. In ‘Parahara’, two siblings, aged ten and seven, take a five-year-old on a remote bushwalk. When they take a wrong turn, they are plunged into a frightening unknown, as are the two sets of parents awaiting their return. Grimshaw brilliantly brews an atmosphere of beautiful menace; a landscape threatening in its very ambivalence to human life. And so alien: intense heat, black sand dunes, cabbage trees ‘sharp as knives’.

Grimshaw is good at disquiet, at precarious relationships and situations; at mirroring the isolation of her characters with equally stark – and beautiful – landscapes. These are brilliantly carved, utterly gripping stories, with intriguing, complex characters. Well worth discovering!