The Fainter

by Damien Wilkins

An emotionally charged comedy of manners – supremely elegant and funny but also with the power to shake the reader’s feelings.
Luke is a young diplomat on his first overseas posting. He’s in New York, preparing for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. His photo has appeared in the New York Times. He has a knack for success. Then he witnesses a crime, the fallout from which threatens everything.
His fainting spells return and he finds himself back in New Zealand, living on his sister’s farm, caught up in another difficulty altogether, and involved in the life of a community whose personalities and rules of conduct he finds as bewitching and dizzying as anything experienced at the frontline of international diplomacy. By the end of his time there – which takes the reader only halfway through this novel – Luke has been asked the most testing questions about himself.
In the second part of the book, these questions return with a new and surprising urgency. The Fainter is a superb novel, beautifully written, bracingly funny, rich with cutting insight and cool compassion.
Damien Wilkins is the author of eight books in total, including a book of poems and two books of short stories and he edited Great Sporting Moments: The Best of Sport Magazine 1988–2004 (VUP 2005), winner of the Reference and Anthology category in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
A collection of his short stories For Everyone Concerned was released in June 2007
He is better known however, for his award-winning novels. The Fainter (November 2006) is Damien Wilkins’ fifth novel and further underlines why he has been called ‘one of the few major writers in this country’. The Fainter was named as one of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2007 Best Books in the South East Asia and South Pacific region and was runner-up in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007.
Chemistry (March 2002) was a NZ bestseller and was published in NZ by VUP and internationally by Granta Books and Allen & Unwin. Nineteen Widows Under Ash was joint runner-up for the 2001 Deutz Medal in the The Montana NZ Book Awards while The Miserables won the 1994 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and Little Masters was named by critic Patrick Evans as ‘the most substantial work of fiction yet produced in this country’.

(From Publisher)

Damien Wilkins has taught creative writing in both New Zealand and America, and is well-known here as a book reviewer and essayist. He has also written drama for television and radio. His writing for television includes episodes of Duggan and The Insider’s Guide to Happiness, and he has recently had a play workshopped by the Auckland Theatre Company. He was one of the founding editors of the literary magazine Sport, and now teaches in the MA programme of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. He lives in Wellington, NZ with his wife and two daughters.