Book Launch | The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett

Unity Books Wellington and Victoria University Press warmly invite you to celebrate the launch of The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett. All welcome.

ABOUT THE BOOK In a radically changed Aotearoa New Zealand, Van’s life in the swamp is hazardous. Sheltered by Rau and Matewai, he mines plastic and trades to survive. When a young visitor summons him to the fenced settlement on the hill, he is offered a new and frightening responsibility—a perilous inland journey that leads to a tense confrontation and the prospect of a rebuilt world.

‘Patchett’s is an extraordinary imaginative achievement: an unsettlingly strange, and fully realised, narrative situation and world. I read The Burning River experiencing a mixture of intellectual exhilaration and emotional agitation of an intensity fiction has not produced in me for some time.’ —Dougal McNeill

Cover: Turi Park 210x138mm, pbk, 336 pages

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lawrence Patchett is a Pākehā writer of fiction. His first book, I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales, was awarded the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. In 2013 he was awarded the Todd New Writer’s Bursary. Raised near the Waikirikiri/Selwyn River in Canterbury, he now lives near Wellington with his partner, and has two daughters.