Louise Wallace’s first novel follows a woman returning to work after maternity leave in a small rural community.

She moves between veterinary work, childcare, marriage, bodily exhaustion, yet beneath this runs a darker current: her anger that has been made socially unusable, memory that will not behave, and the sense that motherhood has altered not only her circumstances but the architecture of her mind.

Wallace, previously known as a poet, allows the novel’s form to carry that instability. Conventional narrative gives way to fragments, scattered text and parallel voices; thoughts drift across the page, while myth and ecological unease enter the apparently manageable world of work and family. The result sits somewhere between rural gothic, domestic novel and formally experimental fiction. Ash was longlisted for the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024. First edition paperback. Light rubbing and minor edge wear to covers; clean and sound throughout.