Pip Adam launches Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent at Unity Books Wellington on Friday, 31 October 2025.
Before I start, I just want to acknowledge the work of Āporo Press and the wonderful event that has been bad apple. bad apple has injected something new into literature in Aotearoa, and I think the challenge it lays down and the possibilities it directs attention to will echo for a long time. I’m so incredibly grateful for your work, Damien, and also so thrilled that Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent finds its perfect home on Āporo Press.
It means everything for me to be here tonight and to be part of the celebration that welcomes Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent into the world, riding high in the 1970 Dodge Charger R/T that is Āporo Press.
I’ve been a massive fan of Laura’s work for a long time now. I first met it in her work as Hungry and Frozen—I never really understood food writing, but Laura’s I could read endlessly. There was something about being in the company of Laura’s writing that was affirming and imagined the act of feeding in a way that encouraged community and thought. Laura’s writing in Hungry and Frozen recognises the deep importance and opportunity there is to be had in feeding each other. I wasn’t quite sure how Laura was doing what she was doing with words on the screen but, from that moment on, I sought out her writing wherever I could find it.
Whenever I’m trying to talk or think about Laura’s work, I always read Laura’s poem ‘ACTIVITIES’. It’s one of my favourite ever written in Aotearoa, and I read it often. Even when I’m not talking or thinking about Laura’s work, I’ll go to it to make sense of something that is hard to live around or with. It’s a touchstone for me—to Laura’s voice and craft. It’s a poem I’ll use to get a handle on what it is I love so much about Laura’s writing. ‘ACTIVITIES’ represents the joy and humour and music of the everyday activities that measure the beat of time, moving and then washes them with a deep poignancy that can only come from keen observation and participation in life.
I think this ‘living’ quality, this ‘life on the page’, is one of the features I love in Laura’s work.
Laura has this gift for representing ‘aliveness’ in all its shades on the page. There is an energy to her writing that is on full display in Hoods Landing. It’s such a pleasure to read a book-length work of fiction from Laura. To read her explore the lives of a towns-worth of people, to deal with decades of time from the incredibly well-controlled narrative of a Christmas holiday.
Laura does this amazing job in Hoods Landing of creating not only a compelling narrative that moves forward in the most thrilling way but also a work that understands the importance of stillness and the opportunity these moments give for going deep into the lives of the characters, but also into life itself.
The book’s structure, which includes ‘Rita counting the dead’ through interspersed chapters that recount the people of the town who have passed, demonstrates Laura’s astute understanding of craft. I came to think of these sections as the songs in a musical. They add tone, they move the story along but they also allow the reader a chance to be in their bodies and feel the rhythms of life—to hear the swell of the voices in the chorus of the dead and to feel the minor chords of the way sometimes life unfolds not in a fair way, not in a kind way, just in the way it does. This is a book that understands the balance and relationship of life and death.
Hoods Landing’s exploration of life and death inevitably is also an exploration of time. The past, the present, the future. The work is interested in a system of time that is spiral in nature and, often, Hoods Landing is a place where all times are here, now. This all-times aspect is expertly conveyed in Irene’s tarot, which—in Laura’s hands—sits in the same world as whakapapa and ‘Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua’.
Hoods Landing feels like such a gift to queer literature in Aotearoa. Its generational representation of queer lives offers a truly New Zealand history of queerness in small towns and past times. I hope Laura won’t mind me saying, but the message that love can survive and thrive in the most difficult times touched me immensely—especially in this moment as we witness and experience a new assault on queerness. I also think Hoods Landing is such an excellent antidote to the erasure of queer people from rural and New Zealand history. Hoods Landing describes a small town that is not the utopia of Schitt’s Creek but instead a place where challenge galvanises friendship, family and romantic love.
Hoods Landing is an incredibly exciting novel, beautifully imagined and expertly crafted. It’s a compelling work that breaks new ground in the literary landscape of Aotearoa. Told at once on an epic and intimate scale, this family story queers small-town Aotearoa in ways that have been missing in our canon until now. Laura Vincent seamlessly and skilfully weaves the aesthetics of film, musical, opera and food to create a work about love and death like no other I can remember. This is a deeply affecting book that understands the dark and light of life and the absolute necessity and reality of both. I love this book and am so happy it is in the world!
