When I open the shop

by dissanayake, romesh

• ISBN13: 9781776921300
• ISBN10: 1776921305
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-04-08
• Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press

Summary

In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely. Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes – as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa – it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.

Author Biography

romesh dissanayake (Sri Lankan, Koryo Saram) is a writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work has appeared in The Spinoff, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and A Clear Dawn: An Anthology of Emerging Asian New Zealand Writers. His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka— Victoria University of Wellington.