When I Open the Shop

In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely. Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes - as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa - it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community. 'When I open the shop is a novel about loss, exile and dislocation, in which time, space, and memory become a beautiful, fluid thing. It is very funny, angry and constantly pleasurable and moving in the way it depicts people opening space for themselves, and finding comfort, in spite of everything.' -Brannavan Gnanalingam, author of Sprigs and Slow Down, You're Here 'This is a beautiful and compelling work. The language is magnificent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but I think that the structure is an incredibly adept act of decolonisation.' -Pip Adam, author of Audition and Nothing to See