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All welcome to the launch of The Chthonic Cycle, the debut book of essays by Una Cruickshank. 'Every page of this rich and illuminating debut is a feast,’ writes Ash Davida Jane. 'Rich and lyrical, gorgeous and astonishing, scientific and poetic,' writes Rebecca Priestley. 🐚 Thursday 31 October, from 6pm
🐚 Unity Books, 57 Willis Street, Wellington
See you at Unity on Halloween for drinks and nibbles and a book signing by Una.
For more about the book: https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/products/chthonic-cycle
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At the heart of Una Cruickshank’s debut are Earth’s interlocking cycles of death and reuse. The blood of a billion-year-old tree emerges from the sea as a drop of amber; 4,756,940 pieces of Lego float towards the Cornish Peninsula; a giant squid’s beak passes through a whale’s intestines into bottles of Chanel No. 5. The violence of colonisation underpins some of the transformations illuminated here, as we follow wave after wave of ruin and remaking.
This is a rare kind of writing, both galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific. The Chthonic Cycle reminds us to be chastened and scared by our world – its mind-bending age, the insane complexity of its systems, the violent upheavals and mass extinctions – as well as to be awed.
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Una Cruickshank has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and another earlier MA that she doesn’t talk about as much. She was born in Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland and now lives in Pōneke Wellington. She works at an audiovisual archive and haunts the city’s cinemas and libraries, and that one karaoke place that smells like boiled meat. The Chthonic Cycle is her first book.
Cover artwork: Sasha Francis
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis Street,Wellington, New Zealand
