your lucky day

Relative Strangers is a quiet, unassuming short novel, small in scope yet large in emotion. Dunedin author Emma Neale details the claustrophobic world of domestic yearning, one in which the strands of work, love and passion seem to separate rather than unite. As in an Anita Brookner novel, hers is a neat, circumspect world revolving around conventional lives and heartaches. Neale successfully handles her subjects – particularly the age-old one of adultery – in a way that is fresh and timely.

Three central characters feature in this novel, Neale’s fourth: Chloe and Allan, married for eight years, and stranger Colin. Chloe and Allan have recently moved from Wellington to Dunedin, where Allan has a lectureship in the zoology department. Allan is frequently away on business and Chloe is consumed with their infant son Hugo (who, it turns out, she went to some secret lengths to conceive).