All Her Lives

Characters recur across these connected stories, and what one woman does carries on into the lives of those who come later. Girls are raised among the flowerbeds of Truby King, who founded the Plunket Society; a young queer woman studying in Berlin dances at a rave in the mid-2000s; a single mother scrapes by; another mother pays a price when her son joins a climate uprising. Alongside them travels the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, through private mourning and revolutionary hope in the 1790s. Love and politics, motherhood, memory and restriction shape every one of these women, who resist the parts given to them and keep unpicking and remaking who they are.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

272 pages in the original

Genres

Politics, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand, Germany, 1795 to the present

First published

2025 by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Author's age

50 when first published

ISBN

9781776923007 (Te Herenga Waka University Press, New Zealand)