Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Bug Week -- Living the dream -- A pair of hands -- Psycho ex -- The baddest Toroa in town -- The turtle -- Billy the Pirate Poet -- A summer of scents -- The girl who shaved the moose -- Sin City -- Trashing the flowers -- The teashop -- A quiet death -- Acknowledgements.
A science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swingers party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.
New Zealand Acorn Foundation Literary Award (won), 2021