Peninsula

There’ s Di, waking up in hospital, feeling scrubbed raw. Ritchie and Willy, toasting their dead friend with ginger beer. Kiri, frantically searching for a lost child. Ember Eyes, with his goat and his too-powerful gun. Rachel clambering up a cliff face. Ellen and her friends bashing through the bush. Loosely centred on three generations of the Carlton family and told with restrained lyricism, Peninsula is a set of ten interwoven stories about the lives of an ordinary rural Northland farming community over decades of change. It’ s a community populated with stoic, fierce characters who brim with feeling, embroiled in rich and complex relationships with the land, and with one another. Though it is full of the familiar – peacocks, thistles, tramping huts – it is also a place of dreaming. Peninsula, by newcomer Sharron Came, won the 2021 Adam Foundation Prize and introduces a new voice in New Zealand fiction.