I've just started reading The Grandiflora Tree by Shonagh Koea. I picked it off Mum's bookshelf when last back in NZ and became absolutely absorbed for a few hours before family-visiting duties hooked their talons back in and pulled me away struggling. Having reopened it, I'm being charmed as strongly as I was then.

It surprises me that Koea isn't better known internationally. She immerses you in her character in a way that brings to mind Coetzee's singleminded focus on his world (eg Age of Iron). In the novel I'm working on at the moment, I'm doing something similar (cheeky to make the comparison, I know) with that intense gaze directed at one individual's reality - in my case it's somebody at the other end of life, just emerging from adolescence.

To be continued...

Yes, a very satisfying book. An absorbing read. A closely detailed look at the grieving process - as well as a post-mortuary journey of discovering who the narrator's partner really was. If I have any criticism it was that the voices of the well (or not) wishers were all a little uniform and they went on a bit too long - I would have liked a greater sense of a range of the people surrounding her. As it was, it felt like (and the author probably intended it so) these voices were a single amorphous mass. The husband's diary was a fun read - incredible to think there might have been enough desirable females in the entire British Isles to satisfy him!

Regarding the Koetzee comparison: although Koea does communicate well on the universal theme of death and grieving, Koetzee's prose somehow lifts you uniquely, on a breeze stinking of noble humanity, which very few authors can manage. His subject matter too - the changes occurring in South Africa - are a powerful prop with which to explore the human state.