Women and girls walk a perilously thin line between ruin and redemption in these stories as they try—with varying degrees of success—to outmanoeuvre the violence that threatens to define their lives. There’s the physical violence of men against their bodies—and sometimes the violence they exact in revenge. While doubts about a romantic partner, an abandonment by a sister, the fallout of a parent’s pornography addiction, the betrayal of a friend, even the desire to touch a stranger’s fur-like body are subtler aggressions that pack their own kinds of punches. Moving between contemporary New Zealand and London, and a dreamlike landscape that isn’t quite real, this debut collection shimmers with a brutal kind of hope, exploring power and its contortions, powerlessness and its depravities, and the ends to which we will go to claim back agency.