A Smatter of Minutes

"A Smatter of Minutes" belongs to the genre labelled Women's Literary Fiction and has around 83,000 words. They are, every one of them carefully curated to paint a picture of the kind of nuanced character growth that will have readers rooting for the underdog - the protagonist Chef Abigail Moore - in hopes, she'll someday blunder into the amazing person she's meant to be. Haunted by the memory of her parent's murders, Abigail's life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Only a toddler, she is packed off to her loving grandmother who is fashioned from the same clay as she is. Gramme Kathleen lives in a small close-knit Roman Catholic community on Gloriosa Street, a street that crackles with the energy of its people; people who live secret lives, camouflaged, rendered almost invisible in a country that teems with billions - India. It is here she meets the mysterious Isaac and her best friend Marconi, members of a "strange" family who have literally shut themselves off from the rest of the neighbourhood. On Gramme's death, Abigail is set adrift once more and decides to return to New Zealand, the country of her birth. There she is reunited with her half-brothers Robert and Kenneth. Though they are strangers to her, she cannot deny the tenuous link she shares with them - memories of that terrifying night when she found her parents "melting". Memory, they say can be imperfect, and can throw up surprises, as Abigail soon discovers. If one were looking to slot the novel into contemporary literature, it would fall somewhere between the deft insightful writings of Jhumpa Lahiri and Elizabeth Strout. Though these authors could not be more different from each other, their work embodies fiction's unique access to emotional truths. "A Smatter of Minutes" has this quality.