The Axemans Carnival: The No. 1 International Bestseller

(Paperback)

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In this darkly comic work of literary satire by New Zealand's most acclaimed and best-selling novelist Tama, a talking magpie and social media influencer, is the sole witness to a marriage in freefall.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie. 'If it keeps me awake,' says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer in the middle of a years-long drought, 'I'll have to wring its neck.' But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama's fame is growing, and with it, his earning potential. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds - and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them - bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman's Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama is the star of this story. And although what he says to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious), the tale he tells makes disturbingly perfect sense. The Axeman's Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest - comic, profound, poetic and true.

Reviews

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"Questions of knowing and refusing to know, seeing but not believing, scratch at us in Chidgey's pages. Perhaps never more effectively - or entertainingly - than in The Axeman's Carnival."

' - Financial Times

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"The Axeman's Carnival is a compulsive read and flat-out brilliant."

' - Elizabeth Knox

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"Chidgey elegantly weaves together social commentary, magic realism, folklore and myth, and her treatment of serious themes is deft. A deeply engagingnovel with an original and remarkably charming star."

' - Irish Times

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The Axeman's Carnival offers a shrewd look at human foibles through the eyes of a talking magpie called Tama. This novel is an imaginative treat.

' - The Independent

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A precocious magpie takes a bird's-eye view of patriarchy.

' - TLS

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Author Bio

Catherine Chidgeys novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. She lives in Ngruawhia and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction.