An alarm bell: The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey, reviewed
Books editor Claire Mabey unravels the dark questions at the heart of the latest book by one of Aotearoa's most prolific and successful novelists.
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is a propulsive experiment in excavating, at a slant, a certain kind of Britishness. Not only is this experiment page-turning, it is deeply serious work. The unravelling of the novel's central mysteries and mythologies ultimately compel the reader to evaluate what it means to be alive in a human body that can learn, dream and think for itself.
'In this world,' says Chidgey's character, Mother Morning, 'it's not possible to have everything we want. Everything we think is right. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions. Yes?'
This stern line of thought comes on page 11 while Mother Morning is taking a lesson with her three boys – identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence who live in Captain Scott house, one of a string of Sycamore houses, and who are looked after in shifts by Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. The boys study from The Book of Knowledge (strangely reminiscent of that skewed and limiting artefact known as the Encyclopaedia Britannica); they report their dreams to Mother Morning who religiously scribbles them down in her Book of Dreams. Their misdeeds – both minor and significant – are recorded in The Book of Guilt.
The boys are sickly, and require an ongoing regimen of pills, syrups and injections to help them beat 'the Bug'. And if they do, if their Mothers and the doctor ever deem them healthy enough, they might just wake up one morning to find a brochure on their pillow: a pamphlet filled with the promises of Margate. Where all the healthy kids go, with its Dreamland fun park, its sun and 'vast expanses of gold sand' … 'It's a children's paradise, with trampolines, roundabouts, swings, rock pools, seawater swimming pools and the sunniest and driest weather anywhere in Britain.'
Margate becomes a central container in the novel for illusion-by-design. The cover of The Book of Guilt is a segment of a real, vintage 1950s poster used to promote travel to the seaside town. Even without knowing a thing about the events to be unfolded in The Book of Guilt it is an image we might unpick as spectacularly uncanny on face value alone: the mother figure is barefoot but wearing a tidy, 50s housewifely dress, pearl earrings, and her hair is set. She has a wide open mouth, her teeth are perfect. The boy leaping by her side is the picture of health. The skies are almost perfectly clear. The sea is flat and friendly. In the background a man is seated in a striped deckchair, reading the paper, absorbed in news. Two other boys, one with his thumb in his mouth, look after the mother and the healthy boy, bouncing away from them.
Fading seaside towns are microcosms for faded histories and dreams – and the UK's coastline is littered with them. The layered architecture of eras gone by affects a kind of haunting; the bright surfaces and ice cream shops pasted on top peddle dreams of beachside holidays often, in reality, rudely spiked by hyper-aggressive, Hitchcockian seagulls. Pastel-coated shopfronts and dusty vintage stores soften the detection of darker underbellies and thinly disguise the failures of capitalism to inject the buoyancy required to keep the nostalgia at bay.
In Chidgey's hands, Margate is a poster child; a symbol of a national mythology that embedded itself in England's green hills after the end of Chidgey's version of World War II. What would England be like had World War II been resolved by treaty and not victory? This is the speculative heart of The Book of Guilt. What if Hitler had been assassinated and Germany negotiated with? What if concessions had been made and 'difficult decisions' arrived at?
Chidgey's latest novel is uncannily similar to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (which she has not read). It takes similar aim at British identity by puncturing its society with the normalisation of skewed medical ethics. What both novels have in common are questions of nature versus nurture and the eternal thought exercise of what does it mean to possess a soul? The two writers share an interest in the dehumanising potential of such questions. Both Ishiguro (one of the greatest novelists of all time) and Chidgey (fast becoming one of the greats herself) investigate how whole societies, entire countries, can enter a path of gross moral corruption one person, one concession, at a time.
The Book of Guilt is being billed as a huge novel for the UK's publishing year. And it will be: Chidgey's prose has a hungry quality. There is an energy in it that demands we embrace the characters (the book shifts between child narrators and adult ones) and see all the things. The book is littered with the artefacts of 1979: Spirographs; TV shows Mork & Mindy and Rainbow; Stickle Bricks; dainty sandwiches; and carved soaps of pale green. Chidgey's prose is alive with the stuff of place and environment that launches the reader wholly into her worlds.
Take this, from the first page: 'Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled Entrance Hall hung with old dark mirrors. And oak griffin perched on the newel post of the creaking staircase; we touched its satiny wings for luck whenever we passed, and whispered the motto carved on the scroll across its chest: Verité Sans Peur.'
The quality of Chidgey's writing – its richness, its pace – means that this is not a book you can easily put down, despite the sinister drag of its undertow and queasy anticipation of its secrets. You can spy the twists and the slow revelations, but you hope you're wrong; and then the story twists again and it hurts.
The Book of Guilt is inevitable in the way that another book published this year is inevitable: Crooked Cross by Sally Carson was published in 2025 by Persephone Books, which specialises in republishing old, often forgotten books, mostly by women. Crooked Cross was originally published in 1934 and the author died in 1941. Carson's novel is about a German family in Bavaria and how each of them responds to the rise of Nazism and the dehumanising of the Jewish people. It's a profoundly affecting read not in the least due to the knowledge that Carson (who was British but who travelled to Bavaria frequently) was using the novel form to document the violence of her times, and because the outcome of the story is … well, history.
Chidgey's book is speculative historical fiction. But the project of it resonates with Persephone's project of republishing a novel that witnessed the rise of fascism and how the scapegoating of a group of people was seeded, and took root, among an entire population as justification for genocide. By changing history, and introducing us to a Britain which used treaty concessions to open the door to grotesque medical mistreatment, Chidgey asks the reader what Carson asks hers: What would you have done? Would you have had the moral courage to resist? What grievances, what perceived fears might you allow to get in the way of the preservation of life? Would you attempt to argue the nature of a soul? Would you allow yourself to take part in a project of dehumanisation, even if it was framed to you as necessary for the greater good?
These books settle in the mind as totems: through the vicarious qualities of fiction they scream at us to wake up from whatever illusions we might be under and pay attention to the history we're living through right now; to remember that history can, and does, repeat. The novel form lets us into the heart of the humanity at stake, the humanity we're letting slip: the mind sets, the papering over of reality with skewed politics, with facades, and what narratives dictate what some deserve, but not others.
The Book of Guilt is not only a terrifically compelling read – it is also an alarm bell.
purchase at Unity Books.
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The Spinoff
3 days ago
- The Spinoff
The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending June 20
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books' stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $60) Spot New Zealand's former prime minster on this week's New York Times bestseller list. 2 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) The un-put-downable alternate history that explores some of life's biggest questions, including what does it mean to have a soul? Can a human ever not have one? 3 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpents Tail, $30) Auckland really loves this hectic mother-son roadtrip novel. 4 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38) Everett's biggest book yet is his stunning, funny and profound retelling of Huckleberry Finn. 5 Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum (Bloomsbury, $25) Cosy and charming and perfect for a long Matariki weekend. 6 The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26) This year's winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. One of the most exquisite novels you'll read this year: it is moving, sexy and surprising. 7 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35) The smash hit novel based on a true crime story of a serial killer who lured her victims in with stunning food. 8 A Dim Prognosis by Ivor Popovich (Allen & Unwin, $38) An utterly gripping, energetic memoir from Dr Popovich. Revealing! See The Spinoff this weekend to read an excerpt from this brilliant book. 9 Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Random House, $38) Vuong's second novel. 10 King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby (Hachette, $38) A fiery crime novel. Here's the blurb: 'Roman Carruthers left the smoke and fire of his family's crematory business behind in his hometown of Jefferson Run, Virginia. He is enjoying a life of shallow excess as a financial adviser in Atlanta until he gets a call from his sister, Neveah, telling him their father is in a coma after a hit-and-run accident. When Roman goes home, he learns the accident may not be what it seems. His brother, Dante, is deeply in debt to dangerous, ruthless criminals. And Roman is willing to do anything to protect his family. Anything. A financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, Roman must use all his skills to try to save his family while dealing with a shadow that has haunted them all for twenty years: the disappearance of their mother when Roman and his siblings were teenagers. It's a mystery that Neveah, who has sacrificed so much of her life to hold her family together, is determined to solve once and for all. As fate and chance and heartache ignite their lives, the Carruthers family must pull together to survive or see their lives turn to ash. Because, as their father counselled them from birth, nothing lasts forever. Everything burns.' WELLINGTON 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $60) 2 Towards Modernism: Walter Cook Collection at Te Papa by Justine Olsen (Te Papa Press, $75) This handsome new publication celebrates the Walter Cook Collection of Decorative Arts (held at Te Papa) and the ceramic, glass and metal objects therein. 3 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 4 It's A Bit More Complicated Than That by Hannah Marshall (Allen and Unwin NZ, $25) A brilliant new YA novel from a huge new talent. Here's the blurb: 'Zelle and Callum used to be best friends, but they haven't spoken in three years: not since the tragedy that wrenched them apart, and Zelle moved away. But now Zelle is back, and their lives are about to get a whole lot more complicated. Zelle is in denial about her alcohol use that threatens to spiral out of control, and she's deeply annoyed at having to leave the city. Callum's future is thrown into jeopardy after both a disastrous uni interview and his budding romance turning sour. But they can't keep running from the past forever, and circumstances force them to examine their grief and guilt and find a way through.' 5 A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan (Allen and Unwin NZ, $37) 'Trevelyan's narrator is 10 years old. She's unnamed until the very end of the book (I won't reveal it here: best to find out for yourself). It's this naive perspective that makes A Beautiful Family both easy to read and impossible to put down. The narrator's innocence is pitted against several disturbing factors, all orbiting her summer in various shapes and shades, and it's that persistent dance of disturbances that creates the sustained and unrelenting tension in the novel.' Read more of Claire Mabey's review on The Spinoff, right here. 6 The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26) 7 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 'I don't want to say that Delirious is the pinnacle of what Damien can do because that would be like putting a curse on his future work. But I am going to say it's almost impossible for me to imagine how he could do better. I think this is a great book – Great with capital G.' Even before Delirious won this year's Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, Elizabeth Knox was rapturous about Wilkins' beautiful novel. 8 Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (Scribe, $37) Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. 'In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women's rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it's in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.' 9 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38) 10 The Māori Millionaire by Te Kahukura Boynton (Penguin, $35) 'Te Kahukura Boynton is Māori Millionaire, and her debut book is here to help. Learn how to make money by clearing debt, saving for an emergency, finding work and increasing your salary, and even starting your own business and investing in shares and yourself. With tips on building better habits with your money and your life, Māori Millionaire is the positive mindset change you might be missing.' So goes the blurb.
The Spinoff
11-06-2025
- The Spinoff
A Beautiful Family: a haunting summer holiday novel, reviewed
Claire Mabey reviews the novel about a New Zealand summer that caught the attention of one of the world's most famous agents and is being released in multiple countries, with a film adaptation attached already. Jennifer Trevelyan's pathway from unknown author to international name is a particularly compelling one. Media attention has been hot and close this past week as A Beautiful Family is released in Aotearoa, Australia, the US and UK. On RNZ's Nine to Noon, Trevelyan told Kathryn Ryan how she'd been writing away for a decade before she finally felt she had a manuscript worthy of sending out to an agent. Felicity Blunt – renowned literary agent – responded (for the uninitiated, this is notable in itself: it is extremely hard to get an agent, especially such a huge one) and the fairytale trajectory from hopeful scribbler to signed-up writer was set into motion. Blunt sold the book into multiple territories, secured Trevelyan a two-book deal, and sold the rights to the film, which already has Niki Caro down to direct. Trevelyan told Ryan that her one wish is that it is filmed in New Zealand. Without knowing anything about the novel, this is an extraordinary story. It is notoriously hard for New Zealand writers to crack the international market: not many manage to do it and certainly not via the pull power of Felicity Blunt, who represents Meg Mason, Jilly Cooper, Claire Keegan and Bonnie Garmus among others. It's the kind of dream-come-true that gives hopefuls just enough to plough on with. Though the chances of such a sequence of events happening again is so slim it's hard to imagine it repeating anytime soon. I received a limited edition advance proof of A Beautiful Family a few months ago with the number 137/150 handwritten on the promotional cover, which read 'if you only read one book in 2025 make it this one'. I have to admit that at this point in the game I'm skeptical of such commands. I get a lot of advance copies with grand promises and I don't read them all: that would be more than a full time job. I put the book in my pile and frankly forgot about it until a week ago when I was looking through my to-be-read piles trying to find something that I'd be able to read quickly, and that might hold my attention over a gloomy, frigid day in which I was stuck inside with a head cold. Enter, the child. Trevelyan's narrator is 10 years old. She's unnamed until the very end of the book (I won't reveal it here: best to find out for yourself). It's this naive perspective that makes A Beautiful Family both easy to read and impossible to put down. The narrator's innocence is pitted against several disturbing factors, all orbiting her summer in various shapes and shades, and it's that persistent dance of disturbances that creates the sustained and unrelenting tension in the novel. Child narrators aren't uncommon in adult literature but the decision to use them is fascinating to me. Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt uses the perspective of three siblings to tell that sinister story; John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a famously affecting use of the child's perspective to tell a holocaust story – the adult reader immediately understanding what the child characters do not. This distance between the child narrator and the adult reader is where sickening suspense lies: as adults we know more than they do and all we have left is to hope that, in this story, we're wrong. A Beautiful Family is set on the Kāpiti Coast in the 1980s. We know this because Trevelyan is meticulous with her references to the time period: the child's prized possession is a Walkman through which she plays Split Enz; The Exorcist has aired on TV; there are Seventeen magazines with sealed sections; the child and her sister Vanessa get terrifically sunburned and only after getting blisters does their mother buy some SPF15. There is also casual racism at play in varying degrees of intensity. A Chinese family is talked about in grotesque terms; a Māori character is described as having 'skin the colour of burnt caramel'. It makes you grind your molars until you remember that this is the 80s and such clangers were horrifyingly commonplace. The question that came to haunt me as I read A Beautiful Family was from what distance is this child narrator telling her story? The voice is in first person, past tense, which indicates that there is space between the events and the telling of them. But it's never made clear how much space: only a couple of moments where the narrator says directly that she doesn't remember a certain detail. For some reason this struck me and niggled at me. I suspect that not many other readers will be at all concerned with this but I wished for those intimations of distance to be either removed or embellished because, for this reader at least, it made me question memory, naivety and the precise impact of the story on its teller. Trevelyan has revealed herself to be a perfectionist and a very careful writer so I doubt that this ambiguity is erroneous, but rather a deliberate nod towards the way core childhood memories stay, and replay. Because this is a summer that lingers: it's the kind of childhood scenario that would lodge itself in the brain and return to the mind's eye with changing lenses as you aged. It is immediately clear that the child's parents are unhappy and that Vanessa (the sister) has struck a particularly unpleasant and caustic stage of her teenage years. The child is left largely to her own devices until she meets Kahu, a young boy, and he tells her about Charlotte who disappeared from the beach one summer when she was nine years old. The book is haunted by Charlotte in several ways. As an unsolved mystery it gives the two lonely children something to investigate; and it adds an extra element of suspicion to the dead-eyed neighbour that trains his gaze over the child and her family. Trevelyan carefully places her threats: there's the simmering unhappiness between the parents; clear signs of an affair; a very creepy neighbour; and the sea. Children are frequently left alone at the beach in this story. While the descriptions of diving in and out of the waves like dolphins are charming, nostalgic, you're left to worry about drowning. New Zealand has horrendous child drowning rates. Our losses make it very hard to read a local novel where the sea laps and waits for unsupervised children. You're left to shout into the pages for the adults to focus on their kids for once; to shout 'remember Charlotte?!' The mother character is one of the most intriguing figures in this novel where the adults are so absent they're almost abstract. She's having an affair (this is made obvious early on), and she's trying to write a book. At least, her child thinks that's what she's doing. Whatever it is she's scribbling, it lets her take her eye off the ball: helps her escape her family, escape parenting, her miserable marriage, her surroundings. Early on we learn that the mother usually demands they holiday in remote places. So her family finds it unusual that this summer she wants to go 'where there are people'. It becomes clear that the affair has a lot to do with this change of heart; but what I found most interesting was the depiction of the writer as selfish, self-isolating and self-destructive. I suspect that many women of a certain age will empathise strongly with her, particularly in contrast to the man she married. Through his child's eyes we get glimpses of a father who thinks it's not his job to chaperone the children on the beach; who is friendly enough but who is quietly fuming about his marital situation; who is racist; and who enacts a violence that will severely scar any of Trevelyan's readers who are writers. A Beautiful Family reminded me, to some degree, of the film Little Children (2006). Ostensibly a movie about an affair, it becomes, in dramatic fashion, a story about the selfishness of adults: the damage they can cause to the children they like to think are unknowing and unseeing. Trevelyan's story plays a similar trick in that its mystery centres on a missing girl, a creepy man, and the terror that experimenting teenagers can inflict upon themselves and others. But this is really a novel about parents: about what they don't see, what they distract themselves with (cricket, BBQs, projects, affairs, discontents) and what they miss. But what of that bold claim on the proof copy? A Beautiful Family is well written, it's immersive, and it is haunting. It's a novel that will prompt you to look back over your own childhood and assess the threats; the fast friendships; the collisions with siblings and strangers. A Beautiful Family has an atmosphere and an eye for place that means it has the potential to make a good Aotearoa noir film and one hopefully filmed on the Kāpiti Coast. I can see why Felicity Blunt was so confident about this novel: there is a universality to the way the child observes danger, weathers the storm of family, is plagued by what she remembers. There's a cinematic quality to the writing. But I hope you read more than one book in 2025. New Zealand is producing so much compelling fiction: more of it deserves to be read, discovered, and helped to go big. Hopefully Trevelyan's success will help kick that door open a little wider. A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan ($37, Allen & Unwin) is available to purchase from Unity Books. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
NZ Herald
06-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Top 10 bestselling books: June 7
Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt holds fast at the top of the NZ bestsellers' list. Photos / Supplied 1. (1) The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Heading all the local charts for the third week running is Catherine Chidgey's latest novel, which tells the mysterious, ominous story of three boys in an alternative 1970s Britain. It's a 'tense, 'There is the hint of submerged identity; of aspiration and prosperity, rubbing skins with disappointment and neglect; a preoccupation with what is authentic and what is fraudulent; the self and truth only dimly visible … Calling on the deeply rooted psychological power of the storytelling rule of three, the novel is divided into The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge and The Book of Guilt. Three women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, care for a set of 13-year-old triplets in an all-boy's orphanage. There are three main narrative perspectives: Vincent, one of the triplets; the Minister of Loneliness, a government minister in charge of national care institutions known as the Sycamore Homes; and Nancy, a young girl kept in seclusion by fastidious older parents. This attention to pattern also coolly embodies the quest for order and control, the troubling obsession at the core of the fictional investigation.'
