Singularity

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Medal for Fiction. She has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. Singularity, her powerful new collection, further develops the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added. The stories in Singularity cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each also contributes to a unifying narrative. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind the five principal characters together.