Author(s): Diane Brown

NZ Fiction

Finalist, Montana New Zealand Book Awards, 2003

Eight Stages of Grace follows varied stages in the lives of two neighbours who are both coming to terms with living in new territories and learning the language of their own personal grief. Ruth is grieving over her dead husband while Grace is adapting to life in New Zealand. Their gentle, tentative friendship flows through this verse novel, contrasting with the dramas of Ruth's other friendships, both old and new. While looking back to her past, Ruth also has to hurdle the many complications of her modern life, such as a teenage son who may or may not be taking drugs, and gay friends being outted.

Elegiac and funny, lyrical and hard-hitting, this work - the first verse novel written by a New Zealander - reads with the accessibility and ease of a novel and the beauty and grace of a poem.

Diane Brown is a novelist and poet. Born in Auckland, she currently lives in Dunedin where she writes books and reviews, assesses manuscripts and teaches creative writing and ESOL. Her first book Before the Divorce we got to Disneyland, a combination of prose and poetry, was published in 1997 and won the Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards. She won the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 1997 and published her first prose novel If the Tongue Fits in 1999. Her short stories and poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, and she has won poetry competitions in New Zealand and England. She has appeared in many literary festivals and was Chair of the Auckland branch of the Society of Authors for four years and is now Chair of the Otago-Southland branch.