Slow Down, You’re Here, the seventh and latest novel by the Wellington writer and lawyer Brannavan Gnanalingam, is packed with the stuff of life. That stuff is mostly work — of parents, of people of colour and of marriage.

A lot of people looked at the Pacific as an empty space without cultures and literature.

Will, a Samoan man prone to bouts of obsessiveness, made a vow: today, this very Sunday, he’d remove himself from the internet.

I slip into an alleyway (a shortcut to my house) and halfway down something flashes in the bloom of a streetlight: wings.