ISBN 978-0-9941237-5-6
October 2016
B format, paperback with flaps, 330pp
Cover design by Theo MacDonald
RRP $40

A comic strip is not so funny when you’re drawing to forget.

Their dreams of parenthood dashed, Harvey and Isobel go for dream jobs instead. Harvey hangs up his stethoscope to become a cartoonist and Isobel takes a promotion at the local museum. Then an abandoned baby comes up for adoption, and Harvey and Isobel discover a family is more work than they bargained for. By Fleur’s eighth birthday it’s all come together nicely – then a voice from the past threatens to nuke their hard-won happiness. Harvey doesn’t stop to think. He acts, and with tragic consequences.

Strip is an intriguing drama that explores how far good people will go to protect the people they love, and asks: Is it possible to love too much?

About the author

Photo provided by author

Sue Wootton is an award-winning poet and fiction writer with a background as a physiotherapist and acupuncturist. Her prizes include winning the Aoraki Literary Awards for both poetry and fiction, and second place in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her combined interests inform her current PhD studies at Otago University and a blog she co-edits called Corpus, both of which explore the nexus between creative work and medicine. This is her first novel.

Reviews

“With a poet’s eye for detail and an ear fine-tuned for language, Sue Wootton reveals the light within the deep core of familial love. Finely constructed, moving and gently optimistic, Strip is a thought-provoking meditation on the unexpected twists of promises kept, the weight of unintended consequences, and the courage and ultimate strength that comes from simply forging on.” — Laurence Fearnley

“The paradox that the experience of pain within a family is at once inviolably shared and violently self-centred makes Strip all the more absorbing.” — Sarah Ross