Title: The Artifical Shore
Author: W.D. Muirhead
Genre: Short Stories
Price: $38.00

Swinging from the satirical to the surreal, the sweet to the sardonic, the seventeen stories collected in The Artificial Shore are a series of short films for the page. Set predominantly in contemporary New Zealand, these warped and sometimes wicked vignettes run the gamut from love stories to dystopian sci-fi, social satires to tales of the supernatural. Even when the genres are familiar, however, Manawatū-born author W. D. Muirhead ensures the reader will never be quite sure where he’s taking them next…

About the Author

The eldest child of two English lecturers, W. D. Muirhead grew up surrounded by books and one of his proudest achievements remains finishing Roald Dahl’s The Twits in a single night at the age of six. He has spent most of his life in the Manawatū, much of it furiously writing for a range of media and in forms extending from journalism to poetry and stage plays to book-length local histories. (Plus one self-published novel accurately described by his father as “like something written by a very strange genius twelve-year-old.”) A relative newcomer to the world of short stories, The Artificial Shore is a kaleidoscopic distillation of his obsessions, experiences and observations on that silly little species called humanity.