The Heart Sutra
A vibrant, engrossing collection, where satisfying storytelling meets a very modern sensibility. Caren Wilton is funny and engaging. Her characters find themselves in unfamiliar landscapes: sometimes physical – a Bangkok flat, a youth hostel in Edinburgh, a Wellington massage parlour – and sometimes personal.
Wherever they are, she takes a vivid, compassionate look at human strengths and vulnerabilities, and people’s skewed attempts at finding happiness. Unsatisfactory sex, coin-flipping doctors and an elephant with a wooden leg – Caren Wilton writes page-turning stories whose characters always ring true.
‘An off-centre look at the numb and confused but occasionally lyrical heart’ – Kate Camp
Caren Wilton
Caren Wilton is an oral historian, writer and editor, and was the recipient of three New Zealand Oral History Awards for her series of interviews with sex workers (on which My Body, My Business is based). An editor at Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand for almost nine years, she is also a freelance book editor. She was the coordinator of an oral history project focusing on Upper Hutt in the 1960s for Upper Hutt City Library in 2015–16, and is the author of short- fiction collection The Heart Sutra (Otago University Press, 2003). She lives in the Wairarapa.
More About Caren Wilton
My Body, My Business