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Purchase this book
\n Dead Ends<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a certain kind of debut novel we are all familiar with by now. The blurb reads something like this: \u201cMarnie Stevens is 27 and she\u2019s a wreck! Back living at home after failing to make good in the city, she\u2019s once again caught up in the quagmire of memory and lust she thought she\u2019d left behind\u2026 The question is: do ghosts ever really lie?\u201d Think Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong, Welcome Home, Caroline Kline by Courtney Preiss and Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst.<\/p>\n
The appeal for publishers is clear: this plot type leans in to culturally relevant anxieties about Millennial precarity, and the appeal of small-town simplicity is catnip to burnt-out young women. But due to the market saturation of the \u201cmessy-girl-returns-home\u201d novel, it\u2019s difficult for books in this realm to stand out. Aotearoa New Zealand author Samantha Byres\u2019s debut novel, Dead Ends, does just this. How? Three reasons. One: it\u2019s queer as hell. Two: it\u2019s also a murder mystery, a rural noir that refuses the genre\u2019s sexist leanings. Three: the prose is fresh, literary and funny. For me, it\u2019s the Holy Trinity of compelling contemporary fiction.<\/p>\n
Our protagonist is Nell Jenkins. She\u2019s 33, queer, an \u201call-round chaos merchant\u201d. She\u2019s selfish, a borderline alcoholic, a sex fiend \u2013 she\u2019s also quick-witted, wounded and strangely charming. The novel works on two timelines. In the present, Nell unwillingly returns to her home town to look after her sick mother. We learn that she left home as a teenager after her best friend, April, was murdered: being back forces her to retrieve painful memories from the sludge of her mind, to reckon with the emotional abscesses that greet her.<\/p>\n
In the past, we meet Nell as a teenager. We watch as homophobia modulates her burgeoning relationship to her sexuality; as the pressure to leave home and \u201csucceed\u201d sways her visions of \u201cthe good life\u201d; as her best friend falls deeper into a toxic romantic relationship that spells the end of her life before it begins.<\/p>\n
Throw in a mysterious clairvoyant, a missing aunt, two sexy but damaged paramours and a whole lot of queer popular culture references and what we have is a rollicking page-turner, an earnest meditation on grief and self-sabotage and a sobering portrayal of the omnipresence of domestic violence. \u201cShe tells it like this,\u201d writes Byres, \u201cthere\u2019s dead girls dotted all over this country.\u201d The \u201cmessy girl\u201d trope was a misogynistic fabulation all along.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UQP, 304pp, $34.99<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n July 19, 2025 as “Dead Ends”.<\/p>\n
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\n Dead Ends<\/p>\n
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