The Fainter

Luke, on his first diplomatic posting abroad, is in New York getting ready for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations. Success seems to come naturally to him; his photograph has even run in the New York Times. Then he sees a crime committed, and what follows threatens everything he has. The fainting fits he once suffered come back, and soon he is home in New Zealand, staying at his sister's place in the country, tangled in a different kind of trouble and in a rural community whose people and unspoken rules unsettle him as much as diplomacy ever did. That stay takes up only the first half of the novel; in the second, the hard questions it raised about him return with new urgency.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

340 pages in the original

Set in

United States, New Zealand, 1990s

First published

2006 by Victoria University Press

Author's age

43 when first published

ISBN

9780864735300 (Victoria University Press, New Zealand)