by Laura Vincent
- RRP $38
- ISBN: 9780473745684
- 244pp (TBC)
- Released October 31 2025
- 135 × 216mm portrait (C format)
Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Rolled their names around her brain. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them.
In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other’s buttons, but know precisely when to offer tea (or a tipple). Rita, the 50-year-old baby of the family, is planning to tell them she has cancer. Drifting between past and present, she considers the lives of women in their community and reckons with what it all means for her future and her family.
Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren’t twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together.
“This is a deeply affecting book . . . Vincent seamlessly and skilfully weaves the aesthetics of film, musical, opera, food and the occult to create a work about love and death like no other I can remember. This compelling work breaks new ground in the literary landscape of Aotearoa.”Pip Adam
Laura Vincent (Ngati Mahanga, Ngapuhi) is an author from Waiuku, with writing published locally and internationally, including in The Spinoff, PUHIA, and the No Other Place to Stand and Spoiled Fruit anthologies, amongst others. Her poem ‘ACTIVITIES’ was part of an installation at Britomart for the 2023 Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tamaki and she has spoken in panel discussions for STREETSIDE: Britomart, bad apple, and Same Same But Different.
