Books
Samantha Byres
Dead Ends
There’s a certain kind of debut novel we are all familiar with by now. The blurb reads something like this: “Marnie Stevens is 27 and she’s a wreck! Back living at home after failing to make good in the city, she’s once again caught up in the quagmire of memory and lust she thought she’d left behind… The question is: do ghosts ever really lie?” Think Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong, Welcome Home, Caroline Kline by Courtney Preiss and Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst.
The appeal for publishers is clear: this plot type leans in to culturally relevant anxieties about Millennial precarity, and the appeal of small-town simplicity is catnip to burnt-out young women. But due to the market saturation of the “messy-girl-returns-home” novel, it’s difficult for books in this realm to stand out. Aotearoa New Zealand author Samantha Byres’s debut novel, Dead Ends, does just this. How? Three reasons. One: it’s queer as hell. Two: it’s also a murder mystery, a rural noir that refuses the genre’s sexist leanings. Three: the prose is fresh, literary and funny. For me, it’s the Holy Trinity of compelling contemporary fiction.
Our protagonist is Nell Jenkins. She’s 33, queer, an “all-round chaos merchant”. She’s selfish, a borderline alcoholic, a sex fiend – she’s also quick-witted, wounded and strangely charming. The novel works on two timelines. In the present, Nell unwillingly returns to her home town to look after her sick mother. We learn that she left home as a teenager after her best friend, April, was murdered: being back forces her to retrieve painful memories from the sludge of her mind, to reckon with the emotional abscesses that greet her.
In the past, we meet Nell as a teenager. We watch as homophobia modulates her burgeoning relationship to her sexuality; as the pressure to leave home and “succeed” sways her visions of “the good life”; as her best friend falls deeper into a toxic romantic relationship that spells the end of her life before it begins.
Throw in a mysterious clairvoyant, a missing aunt, two sexy but damaged paramours and a whole lot of queer popular culture references and what we have is a rollicking page-turner, an earnest meditation on grief and self-sabotage and a sobering portrayal of the omnipresence of domestic violence. “She tells it like this,” writes Byres, “there’s dead girls dotted all over this country.” The “messy girl” trope was a misogynistic fabulation all along.
UQP, 304pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Dead Ends".
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