“I recognised the handwriting, and the words. They were mine. It was the first paragraph of my novel; the first words I had written all those years ago in my tiny university flat, the first brave steps of an odyssey that would ultimately lead me here, to this strange and marvellous Heaven.”

So says my protagonist near the end of my debut novel, The Library of Unfinished Business, which launches today.

This is the next phase of a journey that did indeed start years ago (around twelve, in fact), when I wrote the first line of a story that would eventually become 85,000 words.

Stories enrich us. Change us. Find a heart in our homes. Make us scream with laughter or sit with sadness. Remind us of our humanity. Open our minds. Offer us sanctuary and sustenance.

I have no noble, earth-shattering ambitions for my book, but I do hope that the story moves people, and makes them laugh, and imagine, and wonder. I hope it can serve as a temporary escape from a season of violence and uncertainty and turbulence and division here in New Zealand and around the world.

I wish my mother had lived to see this day. She was a voracious reader, and would have been so proud.

Happy reading everyone.

Here’s a list of where you can purchase my book:

• All good bookshops throughout New Zealand (if it’s not on the shelves they will order it in for you) – TODAY
• www.cloudink.co.nz – TODAY
• Amazon (AU) (Paperback/Kindle) – from 2nd March, but you can pre-order TODAY
• Amazon (US) – as for Amazon (AU)
• Book Depository (Worldwide) – from 2nd March
• Booktopia (AU/NZ) – from June