In her young female protagonist Jochems has succeeded in creating a highly original voice that both intrigues and repels.” Oh, and she’s a complete psychopath who can justify anything from bad moods to murder in her pursuit of what she wants – even if she’s not quite sure what that is. Is Cynthia a monstrous sociopath, or simply a lonely, performative product of our Instagram age? How can we tell the difference? Perhaps, Baby posits with caustic glee, they are the same thing.”Īnd this, from the Irish Times: “Meet Cynthia, the millennial girl of nightmares: jobless, aimless, unskilled, vain, hypersensitive, she sits on a couch day after day eating Coco Pops and porridge, watching reruns of reality TV. “There are implicit questions throughout this novel about the complexities of race, gender, power and identity in modern New Zealand, a place Cynthia describes as ‘our dirty country full of animals’. “A memorable addition to the growing coterie of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction,” wrote the Guardian’s reviewer. As for the two reviews, they weren’t merely favourable and positive they were agog, and the tone of each was that Baby had touched a kind of zeitgeist. Two years ago! The new lease of life and flurry of activity in Britain is due to her agent securing a publishing deal with Scribe. The last time a debut novel by a New Zealand author got a rave review in the Guardian and then a few days later another rave review in the Irish Times was like actually never ever, but it happened last month to Wellington writer Annaleese Jochems, the author of Baby, which she always delights in describing as a rewrite of Fifty Shades of Grey.īaby won the best first book prize at last year's Ockham New Zealand national book award, and was published by Victoria University Press in 2017. Wellington novelist Annaleese Jochems has been hailed as the next big thing in Britain. ReadingRoom Young Kiwi novelist a smash hit in Britain

Baby by Annaleese Jochems