Welcome to 1987. It's boom time on the sharemarket and money is flying around the stratosphere just waiting to fall into the hands of those with the nerve to reach high enough to grab it. Mike, a middle-aged romantic lead with a clapped out VW and three kids to different mothers is not amongst them. While his girlfriend Louise is climbing to dizzying heights on the corporate ladder and his six-year-old daughter lives in disdain of anything without a designer label, his teenage son is pilfering from collection plates to pay the rent. When Louise exchanges Mike for someone with a lot more leverage, he has to fall back on his own resources. But how far can three exes, three children and relatively good intentions carry him in a world of mirror glass and paper palaces? Set against the vivid backdrop of New Zealand's largest city in the year of a rugby world cup, the year of an election and the year the shit hit the fan, McGee's portrait of the era is rich, funny, bitingly sharp, and disturbingly contemporary .
Welcome to 1987. It's boom time on the sharemarket and money is flying around the stratosphere just waiting to fall into the hands of those with the nerve to reach high enough to grab it. Mike, a middle-aged romantic lead with a clapped out VW and three kids to different mothers is not amongst them. While his girlfriend Louise is climbing to dizzying heights on the corporate ladder and his six-year-old daughter lives in disdain of anything without a designer label, his teenage son is pilfering from collection plates to pay the rent. When Louise exchanges Mike for someone with a lot more leverage, he has to fall back on his own resources. But how far can three exes, three children and relatively good intentions carry him in a world of mirror glass and paper palaces? Set against the vivid backdrop of New Zealand's largest city in the year of a rugby world cup, the year of an election and the year the shit hit the fan, McGee's portrait of the era is rich, funny, bitingly sharp, and disturbingly contemporary .
Greg McGee - unlikely writer, rebellious rugby player, ambivalent protestor, lawyer and defendant, mutineer tourist, dilettante coach and incompetent kangaroo culler - has in his haphazard journey crossed paths with a diverse cast of characters, from Peter Mahon to Keith Murdoch, Peggy Guggenheim to Duncan Laing, Ken Gray to Billy T. James, Raymond Hawthorne to Bert Potter, not to mention Grizz Wylie, Janet Frame's brother, Pie Madsen's mother, Aussie fortune tellers, Sicilian witches, Vincent van Gogh and any number of writers, actors, producers and other denizens of stage and screen. He has written for theatre, including Foreskin's Lament, 'the great New Zealand play', and for television, notably the controversial mini series Erebus, The Aftermath. McGee has also published the odd short story and sports column, and writes crime fiction under the pseudonym of Alix Bosco.
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