Title: AttractionAuthor: Ruby PorterGenre: Women’s Fiction
The present reckons with the past in Attraction, Ruby Porter’s atmospheric debut novel.Three women are on a road trip, navigating the motorways of the North Island, their relationships with one another and New Zealand’s colonial history. Our narrator doesn’t know where she stands with Ilana, her not-quite girlfriend. She has a complex history with her best friend, Ashi. She’s haunted by the memory of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. And her period’s now weeks late.
Attraction is a meditative novel of connection, inheritance and the stories we tell ourselves. In lyrical fragments, Porter explores what it means to be and to belong, to create and to destroy.
‘[Porter’s] writing has the intensity of Sally Rooney, the rawness of Andrew McGahan’s Praise and 1988 but is also distinctly original…[A]n utterly amazing debut.’ Jon Page
Ruby Porter is a prose-writer, poet and artist. She tutors creative writing at universities and high schools. Ruby was the winner of the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Award in 2017, and the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018, with her debut novel Attraction. Attraction was written during her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland under supervisor Paula Morris, and published in May by Melbourne-based Text Publishing. It is distributed throughout Australia and New Zealand.
