Sam Coley

Well, State Highway 1 is a road that runs from the very top of New Zealand to the very bottom of New Zealand, minus a water crossing.

And the characters in my novel, well, the main character, Alex, comes home to New Zealand after having been away for three years when his parents die in a car accident.

And he travels with his twin sister, Amy, with whom he always had a very fractious relationship growing up, to the very top of New Zealand, kind of drunk and impulsively after the wake in his

beaten up old Mitsubishi Mirage, and then when they come back down the following day are still kind of not processing their grief properly and don't want to go back inside their old home.

So Amy convinces Alex to go on this road trip of State Highway 1 to see the whole of New Zealand from top to bottom on this kind of calamitous, impulsive journey.

Good.

At the moment I'm reading, I've got two books on the go at the moment.

One is Mordu by Alex Febby.

It's kind of like maybe aimed at younger people, but it is fairly horror-ish.

The world that they inhabit is quite grotesque a lot of the time, so it's not like for young, young children.

And it's published by Galley Beggar Press, who are like an experimental fiction publishing house in the U.K.,

And I'm really enjoying it so far.

It's a really easy read, which is nice because the other book I'm reading is Chernobyl Prayer, which was previously published as Voices of Chernobyl.

And it's like a kind of firsthand account of that disaster.

And so it's incredibly bleak and quite harrowing and keeps giving me nightmares.

So I kind of read one chapter of that and then have to go and read some younger person's

fantasy fiction in order to escape.

The best thing I've read, I've raved to probably every single person I meet about this book called The Ice Shelf by Anne Kennedy.

She's a New Zealand author.

And The Ice Shelf is about an author who wins a residency in Antarctica.