Golden Deeds

Catherine Chidgey

May 2014 · Victoria University Press

About this ebook

A tale of murder mystery and Meccano Golden Deeds tells the story of the middle-aged Patrick Mercer, lying unconscious in a hospital bed: of the teenaged Laura Pearse's disappearance and the grieving of her bereft parents; and the story of Colette, a young woman seeking a new life in a strange city. In warm, compassionate and beautiful prose, Catherine Chidgey delineates the connections which, however fragile, bind people together across continents and generations. 'Magnanimous and merciless, a work reminiscent at times of darkest Atwood...A witty and melancholy alchemy of heat and chill, a work of craft and fluency, which revitalizes the book in all its guises...for those who love books, Catherine Chidgey is a find' TLS

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'. The Transformation, Catherine's third novel was published by VUP in November 2003. Catherine Chidgey’s other honours include the $60,000 Glenn Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters; the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; the Todd New Writers’ Bursary; the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury; and the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2003 she was judged the best New Zealand novelist under 40 in a Listener critics’ poll.