And How Are Things With You

Franny is AWOL from her French translation job, her cat-sitting gig is making her anxious, and an obsessive personal project is shooting off in more directions than the London Underground. She needs to leave the UK and return home. But Aotearoa turns out to be less relaxing than she thought it would be, because she keeps running into people she’d rather avoid. Wellington is a nostalgia trip on repeat and the last thing Franny needs is distraction. For her own reasons, she is researching suicide, and the material she’s unearthing is almost overwhelming. Bit by bit Wellington begins to grow on her. She finds herself chatting to a woman over kūmara wedges, getting real with a nonagenarian aunt and attending a ‘die-in’ at a bank to protest global extinction. Meanwhile, Franny books a seat to watch the parliamentary debates for the End of Life Choice bill, and her research takes a startling turn ... And How Are Things With You is shot through with the dark humour and dry observations that readers loved in Footnotes to Sex, a novel British broadcaster Bidisha described as ‘Seinfeld meets Dorothy Parker’.