A new novel from the Commonwealth Prize-winning author.

Hollywood, fatherhood, levitation. This smart, funny, thought-provoking novel is full of surprises.

Duncan Blake is a Kiwi filmmaker whose move to LA has not gone to plan. After a series of setbacks, he’s working at a chain restaurant, his marriage is on shaky ground after a porn-related faux pas and his son won’t stop watching Aladdin.

When Duncan gets the chance to scout locations for a fêted director’s biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino, it’s the lifeline he’s been searching for. But in Italy, in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century levitator, he must confront miracles, madness and the realities of modern movie making.

A novel about the pursuit of dreams, the moral calculus this entails, and the possibility that the rational, materialist worldview isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

 

Craig Cliff is the author of the novels Nailing Down the Saint and The Mannequin Makers, and the story collection A Man Melting, which won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book.

In addition to fiction, Craig has published poetry, essays and reviews, been a newspaper columnist and judged poetry and short story competitions. His work has been translated into German, Spanish and Romanian and he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program in 2013.

He was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2017 and currently lives in Wellington with his young family.