The Mires

Longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

A tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect?

Water will come and you think it will be soft. You think it will be smooth and find its way around your things: your houses and cars and furniture, your gardens and windows and hope. But water can be the foot of an elephant, the horns of a moose, a herd of buffalo running from a lion, water can be the kauri falling in the forest, a two-tonne truck, a whole stadium filled with 50,000 people, screaming … Water is life, and water can be death.

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren't hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.

When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.

Praise for The Mires

‘a novel of real complexity and power, in which care and connection are centred, and the interwoven nature of belonging, place and ecology is brought alive in affecting and productive new ways’ – The Saturday Paper

‘The Mires is about the monsters we’ve created and the power we have to stop them. A truly magnificent novel.’ – Shankari Chandran, author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

‘a courageous book that shines a light on the darkest human behaviour and shows how the best of humanity can emerge from devastation, and triumph over hatred and violence’ – Artshub

‘An immersive, unnerving novel about the hatred that can rise up out of the locked, curtained rooms in our neighbourhoods, and the comfort that can be found in another’s home. A story about people and the land they share. The memories stored in the water and peat. I read this book with equal measures of worry and hope.’ – Becky Manawatu, author of Aue

‘The Mires is an enchanting novel: poignant, earnest and lyrical, this story will settle in your bones.’ – Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of The Hate Race