THE NEXT BIG READ FOR FANS OF GRETA & VALDIN AND LOST LAMBS

'Funny, moving and alive with family lore' Catherine Chidgey

'A gift to queer literature' Pip Adam

'Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them.'

The Gordon girls are no strangers to local gossip. Growing up with a mystic grannie and a mother in a lesbian relationship with the reverend will do that to a family. But for Rita - the fifty-year-old baby sister, back in the village for possibly the final time - there is nowhere else quite like home.

As four generations gather beneath the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, and the kettle comes to a boil, Rita steels herself to share her big news, not yet aware that hers won't be the only secret laid bare before the festivities are over.

With plenty of tipples, a sexy baptism and several German Shepherds named Roger, Hoods Landing is a darkly funny, deeply affectionate novel about the extraordinary lives hidden inside ordinary places and the imperfect bonds that hold families together.



Laura Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāpuhi) is an author from Waiuku, New Zealand. She has written her food blog, Hungry and Frozen, since 2007 and published a cookbook of the same name with Penguin in 2013. She spent five years as the Wellington café reviewer for the Sunday Star-Times, and has also written lifestyle and travel features, as well as publishing poetry internationally. Her work has appeared in Tenderly magazine, TheToast, Vice and an anthology from The Muswell Press. Laura's debut novel, HoodsLanding, was first published in New Zealand by Āporo Press and shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction



Laura Vincent has the rare gift of making every member of her richly drawn cast feel indispensable. Funny, moving and alive with family lore, Hoods Landing is a novel to savour



A family portrait for the ages. Vincent's whip-smart debut entertains and devastates in one sentence, considers mortality and biscuit preference in the next. We are left desperate to enter the Gordon household and meet its intricately-rendered family, and grateful for our own not so dissimilar homes



It's a tremendous family drama; operatic in scope, intimately detailed, deeply funny, and so real it scratches a familiar itch



This is a deeply affecting book. . . Vincent seamlessly and skilfully weaves the aesthetics of film, musical, opera, food and the occult to create a work about love and death like no other I can remember



Quirky and playful, with a gently self-deprecating Kiwi humour and a dash of romantic sizzle. A delightful comfort read that's full of heart



Hoods Landing examines what is lost and what remains in the face of collective tragedy. . . A raw, raucous and riveting slice of social realism