Someone's Wife

A brilliant collection of personal essays from a quietly subversive writer.

These pieces read like the freshest of recent novels: clever, restrained and wittily observant. They range across the personal and the observational. There are essays on Linda's lifetime of being an All Black wife (once an AB, always an AB); her love of teaching, education and the young; and a powerful essay on the death of her baby, Toby, striking in its honesty.

Linda is interested in family and friendship; shared and sometimes distorted memories. Her personal truths link to universal truths. She explores the era in which she grew up, and her experiences are timeless. She looks at living abroad, at children leaving home, at house-hunting in Wellington, at travelling with a grandchild, at Leonard Cohen concerts as tribal gatherings.

Moving but never sentimental, Linda Burgess's essays are an engrossing read.

About the Author

Linda Burgess is the author of three novels, three non-fiction titles and one collection of short stories. She is a monthly television reviewer on Radio New Zealand on Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan, and she was a television and film reviewer at the Dominion Post for several years. She's won a number of literary awards and has been a judge for a number of our national awards. She was shortlisted in the Voyager Media Awards 2019 for one of her essays recently published on The Spinoff. She lives in Wellington.