ABOUT
THE BOOK

Jamie is a forty-one-year-old drug addict. His kidneys, ‘master chemists of the body’, have just produced a stone. He’s in terrible pain and he needs surgery.

He decides he must go somewhere he hasn’t been in years – home – to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely this pair, with their access to pharmaceuticals, and their blood ties, will help him. And if all else fails, there is Jamie’s insomniac mother, who has various prescriptions ‘running around inside her cupboards’.
An old hand at deception, the character of Jamie occupies one pole in this novel. At the other end is a pair of similarly desperate eighteen-year-olds: Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby; and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to get on the methadone programme and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory. As some kind of solution, Sally and Shane embark on a blackmail plot which eventually draws in many of the other characters and which builds to an explosive end.