the long cloud:
a novel
Overview
i had been a male model since i moved to london and initially i was making lots of money and then suddenly i wasn’t making any.
Xander is ageing out. A former high school jock turned model, he’s spent a decade in London riding a carousel of validation and success. Now the ride is slowing down.
When his much-more-successful actor girlfriend, Tessa K, buys him a plane ticket home to New Zealand for the first time in ten years, Xander returns as a stranger. The family farm is for sale. His mother is overbearing. His high school ex wants to reconnect. And his life is unravelling.
Then he meets someone younger, someone vibrant and unburdened, who makes him fall back in love with the small town he fled. But is she the cure for his problems or just another symptom of how empty his life has become?
In the long cloud, newcomer Hector MacKenzie captures the anxious rhythm of life in the ’20s — a tender, often funny meditation on masculinity, beauty, and mortality that proves you might be able to go home, but you can never truly go back.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 256 pages
- 9781917189446
- GBP£10.99
- 11 March 2027
- UK & Commonwealth (ex. Can)
- Mulcahy Sweeney Associates
Categories
Praise
‘A timely, timeless book about leaving and returning, failure and success, ambivalence and disappearance, things and people left behind. It’s funny, snarky, touching, and profound.’
‘MacKenzie astutely shows how nostalgia becomes a siren’s song, luring us back to the familiar only to dash us upon the rocks … Via Xander — as comically vapid as he is at times poignantly reflective — we see how the anxieties of adulthood are born from the anxieties of youth; how, as we strive to define ourselves, fleeing what shaped us so that we may carve out something new, we can wake suddenly, years later, feeling estranged.’
About the Author
Hector MacKenzie is a New Zealand writer and artist. His photographic and film work has appeared in The New York TimesH, SBS, Bustle, Frankie, and The Sydney Morning Herald. the long cloud is his first novel.