The Broken Book

At the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival recently, Fiona Farrell was the star of the opening night with her stories of the Christchurch earthquake - this book takes those stories and gives them weight and heft and context. Fiona Farrell’s meandering travel book shows how an earthquake can change everything in a flash: the book you were writing, the house you were living in, the thoughts that preoccupied you. The Broken Book consists of four essays about life and walking bookended by a preamble and an afterword and interrupted by 20 poems about the Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath. The poems jolt into the essays like aftershocks, like cracks in the text; they make you pause and reconsider. The Broken Book is funny, timely, deeply personal but never self-indulgent - it shows Fiona’s talents as a writer and warmth as a human being.