Author talk: Anne Cleary

The stunning debut novel by the winner of the Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ Fiction Prize 2025. An emotionally charged exploration of what happens when

one moment changes everything.

Some people don’t deserve to be parents . . . do they? A child disappears in broad daylight—and no one sees a thing. Three-year-old Oliver, known as Apple Man, vanishes from a remote car park while his young father, Scott, carries fishing gear down to the beach. When he returns, the car is empty. His son has vanished without a trace.

Apple Man's mother, Fae, gets the call that shatters her life. Enraged with her ex, Scott, and drowning in her own guilt, she is pulled back into his orbit as police launch a desperate search across a wild coastline and dense pine forest. With every hour that passes, the case tightens around them—and the question no parent can bear to answer grows louder: what if he's never coming back?

Far from the search, a grieving woman convinces herself she's been given a second chance. Tessa has lost three babies and the future she believed was hers. When she encounters a small, abandoned boy, she sees not a crime, but a miracle she cannot surrender. As the hunt intensifies, her fragile fantasy of motherhood begins to unravel.

As the pressure continues to mount, everyone involved is forced to confront the same terrifying question: when love becomes possession, how far is too far?

McLeods Booksellers will have copies of "The nowhere boy" for you to purchase at the event.

Anne Cleary was born and raised in West Auckland and moved to Tauranga in 2016. Her short stories have won places in competitions and feature in magazines and anthologies in Aotearoa and Australia. She takes creative writing workshops and co-organises Tauranga Writers' monthly event, Writers on Writing. The Nowhere Boy is Anne's debut novel and the winner of the Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ Fiction Prize 2025.