Durban North, 1997. Following two shocking and insidious incidents of violence, nineteen-year-old Mary Da Costa is flying to Auckland ahead of her parents to make a new start. She is riddled with reservations – New Zealand is where her late brother was supposed to move – and all she really wants to do is keep to herself and work on her art.

On arrival, Mary comes under the wings of the South African ex-pat community, struggling with its own tensions between homesickness and belonging. Finding work at a local dairy, she meets self-appointed Māori leader Nepukaneha Cooper – Buck, as he’s better known. He and his family have some history with these rugby-mad lovers of apartheid, even more now that they’re encroaching on his turf. If only he had the means to fight them off and realise his life-long dream of establishing a marae on the beautiful strip of coast he has always called home.

Meanwhile, adrift between past and present, Mary is forced to dig deep in order to find her own truths and place in the world.

Nick Mulgrew’s long-awaited debut novel – of grand metaphors, silences, absences, and two cities and countries in flux – is a delightfully innovative, surprising, and warm-hearted meditation on family, loss, and home, as well as a deft examination of dislocation, dispossession, and the cultural blind spots of two very different (and in some ways similar) communities.

One evening in early autumn, ten people drive into a tunnel through the Cape mountains – and find themselves trapped.

As their limited supplies dwindle, what do they do? Where can they go? What will they find?

Tunnel burrows deep into the psychologies and coping strategies that connect and disconnect these protagonists in a dark, tense and compelling human drama.

An urgent new novel, told through many eyes; a journey – terrific and mystical – through despair, memory, and love.

In his debut collection of award-winning stories, Nick Mulgrew tells fourteen subtly interlinked tales set along the Southern African coastline from Cape Town to Mozambique, in which relationships, dreams and even narrators die: where fields catch fire, towers implode and the shadows of the past grow long.

But even from the most uneasy corners – tourist traps, colonial purgatories and libraries for the blind – these stories offer small mercies: glimpses of faith, beauty, and the possibility of salvation, no matter how slight.

Told with the magpie’s eye for the vivid in the ordinary, and the surreal in the everyday, Stations presents a fresh, compelling and essential new voice.

Stories featured:
1) Athlone Towers;
2) Turning;
3) Posman;
4) Ponta da Ouro;
5) Stars;
6) Daughter;
7) Gala Day;
8) Die Biblioteek vir Blindes;
9) 1-HR FOTO;
10) Appreciation;
11) Mr Dias;
12) Restaurant;
13) Marianhill, in the Gardens;
14) Stations

Connected by more than their exquisite prose, Nick Mulgrew’s new stories delve into a world of killer eagles, tattoo removal parlours, hardcore punk guitarists-cum-auditors, turtle sanctuaries, plane crashes, amateur pornographers and biltong-makers – a world concurrently too strange and too familiar for comfort. A collection of startling imagination and sympathy – set primarily in South Africa’s least fashionable cities and suburbs – these stories maintain a precarious balance between rich comedy and despair throughout their explorations of grief, spectacle, sex, nostalgia, and the lives of animals, both human and not. With audaciousness met by trademark spiritual undercurrents and poetic flourish, The First Law of Sadness is confirmation of Mulgrew’s status as one of South Africa’s best contemporary exponents of short fiction.