"The knowledge of everyone they’re about to hurt is not an element easy to breathe in. They’re the lovers. You can blame them now, if you want to. That’s your choice: this is the director’s cut." Seventeen powerful stories of contemporary New Zealand life from a writer whose penetrating gaze reveals the full experience of her characters' lives—tragic, comic, rich.

Deleted Scenes for Lovers

Literature & Fiction

Slaughter, Tracey

Short Stories & Anthologies

Victoria University Press

Devil's Trumpet

Literary

A remarkable story of a woman’s life in an unnamed city in the aftermath of a series of earthquakes. It’s written with claustrophobic, relentless and urgent conviction. What’s most compelling is how the story is gleaned mostly through flashbacks, as though, like the city’s buildings, it’s been broken into fragments and we are picking our way through rubble. Gradually, like rescue workers, we uncover the situation of a hospitalized husband, a lover lost to a building’s collapse, and the tender domestic bonds the woman shares with her father and his colleague. This is a dark, oppressive story but, through it, the writer explores how humanity responds to crisis – and has produced a metaphor for our own times. 
~Michael Loveday 
Tracey Slaughter relates her story of guilt and grief in breathtakingly luminous fragments. These postcards from the red zone – brutal, beautiful – are a lament for what is lost, but also a reminder of what we can salvage when everything shatters. An extraordinary work; you will feel its aftershocks far beyond the final page. 
~Catherine Chidgey

if there is no shelter (Novella-in-Flash)

Ad Hoc Fiction

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Books by Slaughter, Tracey