A Sense Of Place

A 30-year-old Rotorua-born, Melbourne-based writer had publishers fighting for the rights to his debut novel.

- Craig Sisterson

Maket is a seaside town 40 minutes southeast of Tauranga. As a teenager, Joshua Pomare was a frequent visitor on surf trips away from the Rotorua horse-racing farm where he grew up. And in his debut novel, Call Me Evie – a book that is about to be published in much of the English-speaking world – a 17-year-old with a shaved head and fractured memory stands on the MaketÅ« headland, listening to the boom of those waves.

She’s not from around here. She’s also under the watchful eye of a man who says he’s trying to keep her safe after something terrible happened.

Pomare’s first novel is an exquisite literary chiller that has drawn comparisons to Gillian Flynn while being an atmospheric nerve-jangler of its own distinct style and voice, including plenty of antipodean touches.

The book had six Australian-New Zealand publishers bidding on it (Hachette won). The North American rights went to Penguin Random House US imprint Putnam and the UK ones to Sphere, a commercial fiction imprint of Little, Brown.

The 30-year-old Pomare says his first successful attempt at writing a novel – after years of practice runs, aborted attempts and a lost manuscript – came from the merging of three elements. The first was MaketÅ«.

“It’s a place that’s just endlessly fascinated me, he says. “I don’t quite know what it is about MaketÅ«, the atmosphere there. We used to go surfing there, and we had a few sort of incidents … it’s this little thumb of rock right in the middle of the bay that’s a Mongrel Mob sort of stronghold. I really did love it, but it was a lot like a dare going there. You’re just a tiny bit ambivalent; sometimes things would happen that were a bit off or strange, or you’d see certain things.”