In a Fishbone Church

Catherine Chidgey

May 1998 · Victoria University Press

About this ebook

When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard – but Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina – they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood. In a Fishbone Church spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan present, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilarating novel. In a Fishbone Church, Catherine Chidgey's acclaimed debut, won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the Adam Award, the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel, and a Betty Trask Award in the UK, where it was also longlisted for the Orange Prize. First published in 1998, it has been a bestseller in New Zealand and has been published around the world.

About the author

Catherine Chidgey was born in New Zealand in 1970 and grew up in the Hutt Valley. She has degrees in creative writing, psychology and in German literature, and lived for two years in Berlin, where she held a DAAD scholarship for post-graduate study. In 1997 Catherine was awarded the Adam Foundation Prize for her portfolio produced during study with Bill Manhire at Victoria University of Wellington's Creative Writing Programme. Her first novel In a Fishbone Church (1998 VUP) has sold over 10,000 copies in New Zealand and has been widely praised in New Zealand and overseas. It won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction in The Montana NZ Book Awards in 1998. In 1999 In a Fishbone Church won the South East Asia and Pacific Region Prize in the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Betty Trask prize for a first book (UK) and was included in the Orange Prize for fiction (UK) longlist. In a Fishbone Church was published in the UK and Australia by Picador, and in Germany by Carl Hanser Verlag. Her second novel, Golden Deeds(2000), also a New Zealand bestseller, was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 2000 The Montana NZ Book Awards. It has been published by Picador in the UK and under the title The Strength of the Sun by Henry Holt in the US, where it was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.