Unity Book Club September 2024: The Mires

About the book:
Water will come and you think it will be soft. You think it will be smooth and find its way around your things: your houses and cars and furniture, your gardens and windows and hope. But water can be the foot of an elephant, the horns of a moose, a herd of buffalo running from a lion, water can be the kauri falling in the forest, a two-tonne truck, awhole stadium filled with 50,000 people, screaming …  Water is life, and water can be death.
 
Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren't hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.
 
When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.
 
The Mires is a tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect?

Melissa and Eden will be hosting our monthly book club to discuss some of the excellent recently released books.

In September we will be reading The Mires by Tina Makereti.

We have limited tickets available so grab a ticket sooner rather then later and tell your friends and whānau.

Drinks and snacks provided. If you have any specific allergies, let us know and send an email.

If you have any further queries send us an email to wellington@unitybooks.co.nz and address it to Melissa.