'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, a whole 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 Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child who is drawn to the waters of the indigenous wetlands. New to the street is Sera and her family, who are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe and living next door is Janet, an older white woman with an opinion about everything.
When Janet's adult son Conor unexpectedly arrives home sporting a fresh buzzcut and a disturbing tattoo, no one suspects just how extreme the young man has become - no one except Wairere who can feel both the danger, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.
FINALIST OF THE OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2025
NOMINATED FOR THE 2026 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD Tina Makereti is a New Zealander of Te Atiawa, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Ngati Rangatahi-Matakore and Pakeha descent. She writes novels, short fiction and creative non-fiction.
Her first novel, Where the Rekohu Bone Sings was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2016 and also won the 2014 Nga Kupu Ora Aotearoa Maori Book Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke, was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award. The Mires is her third novel. A literary page turner set in New Zealand for readers of Celeste Ng, Elif Shafak and Mohsin Hamid. For readers of beautiful literary novels that allow cultural learning/ exploration: about Aotearoa's Indigenous people, the challenge of friendship across boundaries and life as a refugee. Both contemporary and eternal themes: Connects to readers via themes that transcend NZ - of family, prejudice, extremism, the environment, loneliness, the search for belonging, environmentalism. Prize-winning and internationally well-regarded author: Her novels have been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award.
