Intricately plotted, this novel explores different kinds of fictions, infidelity and dangerous freedoms.Anna Devine, a young New Zealand painter living in London, has two chance encounters that set her on a search for answers. Can she really 'see' her new city properly? Can she reconcile family life and art? Her search leads her into past mysteries of her troubled family and her brother's death, and towards future complexities: infidelity, dangerous freedoms, and a whole new eye on her foreign city. In Auckland, in another time, Justine Devantier is reading a novel in order to find out about its author - and possibly about herself. And in a fictional city a man looks for a woman he knew long ago. At the core of this intricate plot is British novelist Richard Black, who may hold the strands that bind all the protagonists together. Grimshaw's brilliantly drawn characters walk through her foreign cities in different guises. She gives us a 'true' story, a fiction, a love...

Award-winning Charlotte Grimshaw's remarkable collection of intertwined short stories.Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story in this book is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind five principal characters together. The stories cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock in Australia to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each contributes to a unifying narrative, which also links back to her previous work Opportunity and forward to her subsequent works, The Night Book and Soon. Both Singularity and Opportunity were shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and the latter won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award.About the AuthorCharlotte Grimshaw is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. In 2000 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature. She has been a double finalist and prizewinner in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, and in 2006 she won the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award. In 2007 she won a place in the Book Council's Six Pack prize. Her story collection Opportunity won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the Montana medal. She lives in Auckland.

'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous, to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' Roza Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the Prime Minister's wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm, but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives. Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. Sharp, moving, brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at...

During the long summer holiday, the Lampton and Hallwright families gather in a large beach house belonging to Prime Minister David Hallwright and his wife Roza. The weather is perfect and outwardly all is well, but the harmony is disturbed when Simon Lampton's brother arrives for a visit. Ford casts a cold eye over the company, barely disguising his contempt for David Hallwright. To add to Simon's discomfort a young man called Arthur Weeks makes contact, asking about his secret past affair, and Roza begins to tell her small son Johnnie a continuous story about a group of fantasy creatures - a story that contains uncomfortable parallels with their current lives. When Simon agrees to meet secretly with Arthur Weeks, the result will threaten the security of them all. Charlotte Grimshaw's exhilaratingly gripping and clever narrative traces the lives of its beautiful people - 'moral imbeciles' in Ford's words - as they jostle for position in their leader's court. This humane and capacious novel, generous and faithful to its characters in ways that they are not to each other, articulates the ancient idea that to be moral is an act of consciousness, an effort of will.