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  • Published: 4 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448156252
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Soon




A penetrating and intense look at a group of powerful people in a small country – by New Zealand’s finest novelist.

During the long summer holiday, the Lampton and Hallwright families gather in a large beach house belonging to Prime Minister David Hallwright and his wife Roza. The weather is perfect and outwardly all is well, but the harmony is disturbed when Simon Lampton’s brother arrives for a visit. Ford casts a cold eye over the company, barely disguising his contempt for David Hallwright. To add to Simon’s discomfort a young man called Arthur Weeks makes contact, asking about his secret past affair, and Roza begins to tell her small son Johnnie a continuous story about a group of fantasy creatures – a story that contains uncomfortable parallels with their current lives. When Simon agrees to meet secretly with Arthur Weeks, the result will threaten the security of them all.

Charlotte Grimshaw’s exhilaratingly gripping and clever narrative traces the lives of its beautiful people – ‘moral imbeciles’ in Ford’s words – as they jostle for position in their leader’s court. This humane and capacious novel, generous and faithful to its characters in ways that they are not to each other, articulates the ancient idea that to be moral is an act of consciousness, an effort of will.

  • Published: 4 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448156252
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Charlotte Grimshaw

Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of eleven critically acclaimed books to date, encompassing novels, short stories and memoir.

A reviewer in The New Zealand Listener noted: ‘A swarming energy pervades every page she writes . . . her descriptive writing has always been of the highest order. Most of it would work just as well as poetry.’

She is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Prize, and Opportunity won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction, along with the Montana Medal for Book of the Year. She was also the Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the Asia Pacific Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel, The Night Book, was a finalist for the New Zealand Post Award. Grimshaw’s fifth novel, Soon, a bestseller in New Zealand, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Anansi in Canada and the United States. These two novels were made into a TV series, The Bad Seed, which screened on TV One in 2019. Her novel Mazarine was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards. In 2021 she published her bestselling memoir The Mirror Book, which was shortlisted for the Ockhams New Zealand Book Awards.

Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She was 2016 finalist in the Canon Media Award Reviewer of the Year, and won the 2018, 2019 and 2021 Voyager Media Award for Reviewer of the Year.

Information on all of Charlotte Grimshaw’s books, reviews and selected reviews and columns can be found at www.charlottegrimshawauthor.com


In 2014, Charlotte Grimshaw and her husband Paul Grimshaw, along with law firm Grimshaw & Co, agreed to sponsor the Sargeson Fellowship, which awards a stipend and residency to writers. Charlotte Grimshaw is also a literary advisor for the Sargeson Trust. She has been involved in writing courses for young people run by the Michael King Writers’ Centre. She has judged the Sunday Star-Times Short Story award twice, and the Auckland University Ingenio short story award twice, and was the judge of the premier award of the 2014 BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story prize. She is also a literary advisor to the Academy of New Zealand Literature.


“Charlotte is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers with a significant publishing record. She has few peers as a fiction writer and essayist, and as a reviewer and public intellectual. Her work for newspapers and magazines reveals her curiosity about the world, her immersion in contemporary politics and social issues; it demonstrates her clear-sighted thinking, willingness to interrogate and expose, and desire to engage with difficult topics. Her writing can be searing and fearless. Her work as a fiction writer wins literary awards and is adapted for television, a rare combination anywhere, especially for an author who is not writing commercial or historical fiction.” – Dr Paula Morris MNZM

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Praise for Soon

Opening the pages of Charlotte Grimshaw’s new novel Soon is akin to tilting the blinds in a dim room; the razor-like precision of her words flood your mind with crisp, searing light, such is the vivid clarity of her prose... It’s a wonderful novel which explores morality and the extent to which we are responsible for our own actions.

Steph Zajkowski, TVNZ

Full of delicious satire, Grimshaw is much lauded in New Zealand and should have entered the British consciousness long ago.

Carla McKay, Daily Mail

Grimshaw cleverly depicts a series of power struggles as her characters seek to manipulate each other, forcing the reader to question their motives.

Anna-Maria Ssemuyaba, Times Literary Supplement

The unsettling juxtaposition of urbanity and blood-letting that characterises Grimshaw's other fiction keeps things edgy and jumpy here

New Zealand Herald

A sly masterly novel

Literary Review

Smart political thriller… Spiked with satire… Sophisticated

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