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Chemistry
Brief Description
Jamie, a forty-one-year-old drug addict recovering from surgery, goes somewhere he hasn’t been in years – home, to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely those two, with their access to pharmaceuticals – and their blood ties –...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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More than twenty years before Damien Wilkins wrote his instant classic Delirious, winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, came Chemistry. Published internationally, Chemistry is a riveting story about families in crisis.
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Description
Jamie, a forty-one-year-old drug addict recovering from surgery, goes somewhere he hasn’t been in years – home, to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely those two, with their access to pharmaceuticals – and their blood ties – will help him. And if that fails, their insomniac mother has various prescriptions rattling around in the cupboards of the old family home.
An old hand at deception, Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other there is Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to go straight and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory.
Fastened hard to small-town New Zealand, Chemistry moves with great force to an unexpected and eloquent conclusion.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781776922987
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 14 August 2025
Country: New Zealand
Imprint: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Edition: 2nd New edition
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 312
About the Author
Damien Wilkins is the author of fifteen books, most recently Delirious (2024), winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and Aspiring, winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been longlisted three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers' Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Putahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers.
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