A darkly comic, gritty, punch-in-the-guts new novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa now, from the author of 1986, Iceland and I Thought We’d Be Famous.
Monday Woolridge is a fighter with a face covered in scars and life full of debt.
Her Avondale flat has no furniture, her father’s dead, her catatonic mother’s in an expensive nursing home and her kickboxing gym is going to Thailand.
Monday’s shitty bartending job pays fifty cents over minimum wage, and she desperately needs another way to generate income.
Dealing drugs off the dark web with her flatmate JJ looks like it’s working – until it really doesn’t, and the pair have to flee Tamaki Makaurau to escape the gangsters, the vampires and the ghosts of Monday’s past.
This is a pacy, heart-twisting, punch-in-the-guts, darkly comic novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa now.
From the award-winning poet and playwright Dominic Hoey, author of Iceland, I Thought We’d Be Famous, and the 2021 SST Short Story Award winner, 1986.
Praise for Iceland, his first book
‘It’s kind of renegade literature … this book has an energy conspicuously absent in much New Zealand fiction.’- Steve Braunias, The Spinoff
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Imprint: Penguin Books NZ
Publication date: 02/08/2022
Poor People with Money
by Dominic Hoey
Review by Ray
There’s so much life and action packed into this brutal, fast, furious story about Monday Woolridge, a fighter and a bartender living paycheck to paycheck in Auckland. In Monday, we are met with an ambitious, chaotic, not-always-likeable character with a clear and compelling voice from the first page. And although the story is about her, her choices, and a get-rich-quick scheme gone awry, the unspoken story is about cycles of poverty, desperation, and generational hurt. Humour and gut-punches and beauty weave together wonderfully – you won’t be able to put it down!
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