Tess

Tess is on the run when she’s picked up from the side of the road by lonely middle-aged father Lewis Rose. With reluctance, she’s drawn into his family troubles & comes to know a life she never had.Set in Masterton at the turn of the millennium, Tess is a gothic love story about the ties that bind & tear a family apart.°°° Kirsten McDougall is a fiction & nonfiction writer who has published three novels through Victoria University Press: The Invisible Rider (2012), Tess (2017) & She’s a Killer (2021). She was the recipient of the 2013 Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary, & a Michael King Writers Centre residency in 2019. In 2021 her story ‘Walking Day’ won the 2021 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition.Her first book, The Invisible Rider is a series of interconnected short stories. It was included in the NZ Listener‘s top fiction picks for that year & was Kate De Goldi’s top book for 2012 on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning radio show. Tess, a novella about a young woman with the power to see people’s memories, was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards, & shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award. Kirsten’s most recent book She’s a Killer is set in New Zealand a few years from now when the world’s climate is in crisis & New Zealand is being divided & reshaped by privileged immigrant wealthugees. In her Radio NZ review Claire Mabey describes She’s a Killer as a ‘gripping dystopia, incredible sense of humour, super accomplished’.Kirsten also has widely published short fiction in journals & anthologies, including Monsters in the Garden: an anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand science fiction & fantasy (Victoria University Press, 2020), Landfall, Sport, Turbine, Big Weather: Poems of Wellington (2nd edition) & Tell You What: Great New Zealand Non-fiction 2016.Kirsten was educated at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a Masters in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2004. In the silence she could hear the oncoming hum, like a large flock approaching. She didn't want to hear his story; she'd had enough of them. Tess is on the run when she's picked up from the side of the road by lonely middle-aged father Lewis Rose. With reluctance, she's drawn into his family troubles and comes to know a life she never had. Set in Masterton at the turn of the millennium, Tess is a gothic love story about the ties that bind and tear a family apart. "I love novels about amelioration, about people trying to mend things and fix themselves. Kirsten McDougall's brave and brilliant Tess is one of these. A novel of tender observation and deftly judged suspense, Tess imagines what it might mean for someone to really know what goes on inside others" —Elizabeth Knox "In the silence she could hear the oncoming hum, like a large flock approaching. She didnt want to hear his story; shed had enough of them." Tess is on the run when shes picked up from the side of the road by lonely middle-aged father Lewis Rose. With reluctance, shes drawn into his family troubles and comes to know a life she never had. Set in Masterton at the turn of the millennium, Tess is a gothic love story about the ties that bind and tear a family apart. Cover by Keely O'Shannessy