Why you should read: The Waters

"Yet again Carl Nixon delivers something brilliant and unexpected . The master of character and place with not a wasted word, this time in The Waters, Carl takes the unusual approach of starting at the end rather than beginning. Taking us back in bursts over four decades to show us how the family we meet in the present became so fractured and damaged. A family that we could easily know or be a part of ourselves.  Wholly unsettling but at the same time fascinating ( the train wreck you can’t turn away from) The Waters shows us that we are not necessarily what we seem and that we are the sum of our experiences, family and the people we share our lives with."

- Nic, National Sales Manager

“I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of fiction. You’ll be swept up in this family's tumultuous life. And I was left wanting more.”

- Shanee, Key Account Manager

"This is the story of the Waters, a family who leave a tomato farm on the Banks Peninsula at the instigation of the head of the family, Pat. Pat Waters is a wavy-haired charmer with a get-rich-quick scheme, a way with the ladies, and a drinking habit that gets worse upon his wife’s death – as do the lives of his children. Carl Nixon reveals what becomes of the remaining family members through an interwoven network of tender yet often brutal stories, some told by themselves, others by friends, acquaintances, and passers-by. In all of these, place – houses, hotels, abandoned housing developments, and in particular a bleak-feeling but lovingly detailed New Brighton – is vividly evoked, as are the bonds of family, the persistence of trauma, and the slipperiness of memory."

– Louisa, Publicist 

"I LOVED this. It really makes you feel for the three siblings whose lives are blighted by their difficult childhood. While deeply of the South Island in its locations, it reminds me of some of my favourite international authors in the ways in which the small triumphs and disappointments of ordinary people are described: eg Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet in its depiction of working class dreamers, and of Elizabeth Strout in the way he cleverly builds up a story via multiple narrators and angles. There is no single major event yet it still feels somehow full of plot and I found myself reading chapter after chapter late into the night. Highly recommend!"

- Becky Innes, Director

"Told through different perspectives, and moving back and forward over forty years, each chapter works brilliantly as a short story, while also adding to the compelling overarching novel, in which we anxiously follow the Waters children, rooting for them to rise above, and come to terms with, their difficult early experiences."

– Harriet Allan, Fiction Publisher