Product Description

In this sprightly, quirky novel, McCarten adeptly describes the snowballing effects of national publicity and town gossip. Teenage meat-packer Delia Chapman's claim that she has encountered a group of aliens is at first considered temporary insanity because of the stresses of her job. For how else can her story, which gains her instant tabloid fame and the envy of her catty friends, be explained? Things get stranger when Delia realizes she's pregnant, but remembers little more of her supernatural experience than lights and noise. When two of Delia's friends also disclose their pregnancies and likewise blame the spacemen, the town of Opunake begins to buzz with reporters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3314148 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 263 pages

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`Combines the cultural savvy of an episode of the Simpsons with the formally meticulous confusion/resolution of a Shakespeare comedy. inventive, engaging and sharply written, it is a thoughtful and often hilarious meditation on the way we spin stories...'

The Mirror
`An impressive novel full of alien abductions and small town neuroses...Weird, witty and wonderful.'

The Observer
`McCarten's dramatic gifts with characterization, plot, dialogue and humour shine through this sparkling novel. Domestic violence, the frustrations of small-town life,
the blessings of beauty and the pain of ugliness, the boredom of factory work - all of these are woven into a story which is a quirky good read and an entertaining expression of the zeitgeist.'

Customer Reviews

Astonishing, fresh and funny re-working of the Nativity Tale
This is a very funny fresh and astonishing re-working of the Nativity story, platyed out, not in Judea but in the green hills of New Zealand, and it not the Holy Spirit who pays a visit, this time, no...you guessed it, its something much more saucy.

A terrific book - enormously entertaining. Five stars.
A terrific book - enormously entertaining, very funny, sharply written, and with a big heart as well. Mccarten writes very well indeed. Because the book is so entertaining, it would be easy to underestimate his skill, but the first three pages are a tour de force and any page will reveal deft multi-layered writing that is a delight to read. Bull's-eye; five stars; Anthony Mccarten walks on water.

Black comedy about spacemen set in New Zealand backwater
School girls claim they are pregnant by spacemen in this hilarious, easy to read novel which turns uncomfortably dark towards the end. McCarten pumps fresh blood into the life of fiction.