Water will come and you think it will be soft. You think it will be smooth and find its way around your things: your houses and cars and furniture, your gardens and windows and hope. But water can be the foot of an elephant, the horns of a moose, a herd of buffalo running from a lion, water can be the kauri falling in the forest, a two-tonne truck, a whole stadium filled with 50,000 people, screaming . . . Water is life, and water can be death.
Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren’t hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.
When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.
The Mires is a tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect?
‘
The Mires is about the monsters we’ve created and the power we have to stop them.
A truly magnificent novel
‘ – Shankari Chandran, author of CHAI TIME AT CINNAMON GARDENS
‘The Mires is a work of art. The impacts of colonisation, movement, and climate change cut to the bone in glittering prose and through characters kept close as neighbours. In The Mires, the environment speaks, culture transcends boundaries and the myriad ideas of home are bitterly defended. Only Tina Makereti could hold a reader in such tense tenderness‘ – Laura Jean McKay, author of GUNFLOWER
‘An enchanting novel: poignant, earnest and lyrical, this story will settle in your bones‘ – Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of THE HATE RACE
‘As both a writer and a refugee, this book resonates with my experiences, skilfully addressing the link between refugee lives, colonialism and climate change‘ – Behrouz Boochani, author of NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS
‘An immersive, unnerving novel about the hatred that can rise up out of the locked, curtained rooms in our neighbourhoods, and the comfort that can be found in another’s home. A story about people and the land they share. The memories stored in the water and peat. I read this book with equal measures of worry and hope‘ – Becky Manawatu, author of AUE
‘A masterclass in social realism with just a touch of magic. […] The Mires carries a strong sense of deep time and environmental change. [It is]a powerful narrative threaded with hope that reflects the numerous dangers of our time, from climate emergencies to the rise of alt-right ideologies’ – Ash Davida Jane,, Books+Publishing (New Zealand)
Tina Makereti is a New Zealander of Te Atiawa, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Ngati Rangatahi-Matakore and Pakeha descent. She writes novels, short fiction and creative non-fiction.
Her first novel, Where the Rekohu Bone Sings, has been described as a New Zealand classic, was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2016 and also won the 2014 Nga Kupu Ora Aotearoa Maori Book Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke, was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award.
The Mires, her third novel, was published by Ultimo Press in Australia and New Zealand and is publishing with HarperVia in the US and by Footnote Press in the UK.
