Artificial Shore

Description

Temporarily out of stock

ISBN: 9780473802752
Title: Artificial Shore
Author: MUIRHEAD W D

Swinging from the satirical to the surreal, the sweet to the sardonic, the seventeen stories collected in The Artificial Shore are a series of short films for the page. Set predominantly in contemporary New Zealand, these warped and sometimes wicked vignettes run the gamut from love stories to dystopian sci-fi, social satires to tales of the supernatural. Even when the genres are familiar, however, Manawatu-born author W. D. Muirhead ensures the reader will never be quite sure where he’s taking them next.

“What can you say about what happened, except it was exactly what everyone said was going to happen? The oceans rose and the winds roared and the bees curled up into small soft mementos of all those decades during which we might have done something but didn’t…

Which is why I decided to go find the last surviving polar bear and dare it to fight me.”

Meet Poko, the last polar bear in the world, surviving after the “General Collapse” on a largely penguin-based diet. Or Ritchie, voluntarily hanging from a meat hook in a butchery freezer. And Mollie and Dan, running a very strange scam on hotels throughout the upper North Island.

Then there’s Claire, whose unconventional new life partner proves a source of concern to her friends and family. And John and Luke (yes, the ones from the Bible), who think
they have a couple of millennia worth of lost publishing royalties headed their way…

Format: Paperback
Publication date: 20/11/2026
Temporarily out of stock