9780143779865

01/11/25

PB

240 pages

A darkly comic, gritty, punch-in-the-guts new novel that captures life on the poverty line, from the author of 1986, Iceland and I Thought We’d Be Famous.

Monday Wooldridge is a fighter with a face like a broken dinner plate.
Fifteen years ago, her kid brother Eddy disappeared and she’s been looking for him ever since.
When she’s not training, Monday works in a bar selling drinks to rich assholes and dreaming of escape.
Together with her flatmate JJ, Monday comes up with a scheme to make enough money to lift them both out of debt. But when things go awry, fleeing the city is their only option to escape the gangsters, the vampires and the ghosts of Monday’s past.
From the award-winning poet and playwright Dominic Hoey, Poor People with Money is a darkly comic, pacy, heart-twisting, punch-in-the-guts novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa New Zealand now.

‘Written with compassion and skill, Poor People with Money is a violent uprising of a novel. This is New Zealand.’
— Pip Adam

‘Dominic couldn’t spell academia if he tried. He’s dyslexic. But he’s a savant story teller. His superpower is making ugly look sexy. He writes for the marginalised. In our country of right-wing sheep farmers and working-class ram raids, we need him to be reporting live from the crime scene. He’s all we got.’
— Tom Scott, musician

‘Fighting is the perfect metaphor for hard times. It teaches us to come to terms with our own morality, our capacity for good and for bad. Dom finds beauty in this struggle, in the space between hope and despair.’
— Matt Williams, Bones MMA