Author(s): Ruby Porter

General Fiction

The present reckons with the past in Attraction. Porter's unnamed narrator is on a road trip between Auckland, Whangara and Levin with her friends Ashi and Ilana, haunted by the spectre of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend, her complicated family background and New Zealand's colonial history. Jealousies intensify as the young women work out who they are and who they might become.

In a series of poetic vignettes, this novel follows three friends/lovers on a road trip of New Zealand's North Island. The women not only reckon with their own pasts and their present connections to one another, but with NZ's settler past and the ways the landscape carries the scars of colonialism. This is an atmospheric novel that questions the stories we tell ourselves personally, collectively and nationally. I loved this! Molly