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.

The thing about storytelling is that the energy of it matters as much as the content. One can hit the stage in possession of the world’s greatest plot but if one mangles the delivery of it, one may as well have just performed for the dead.

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

Faber sat down in his chair and clasped his hands across his lap and waited for Morris who found her seat still clutching the battery pack. When she remarked that the blame for her blunder lay squarely with the one-piece dress she was wearing, I could’ve been forgiven for believing that the ‘Between Two Ferns’ universe I’d just stepped into was quips all the way down.

After escaping the clinic where I wheezed through a pre-employment medical (push-ups, sit-ups and planks, oh my!), I hop on the number 471 bus at the ditch opposite the BP truck stop on Little Boundary Road. I’m glad to leave behind the smell of tar-seal and chicken salt from the scrunched up chip packets in the dry overgrown grass.