Catherine Chidgey is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and consistently surprising novelists. Since her debut in 1998, her works have also attracted international accolades and prizes, including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book (for In a Fishbone Church).

After a 13-year gap between her third novel in 2003 and her fourth in 2016, her career has seen a remarkable second act. The five novels Chidgey published between 2016 and 2023 have been met with critical acclaim both in New Zealand and abroad, and explore diverse subjects and styles.

Her most recent work, Pet (2023), has attracted glowing reviews in The Guardian and the New York Times and was my favourite book of last year. And her 2020 Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The novel published between, The Axeman’s Carnival (2022), won New Zealand’s most prestigious prize for fiction, The Ockham Prize, and is now being published in Australia for the first time.

It explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural New Zealand couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama.

People tell bad stories about magpies. That we hold the souls of gossips, That we carry a drop of the devil’s blood in our mouths. That to meet a single magpie brings bad luck, sorrow, or death. We refused to take shelter in the Ark, people say; instead we sat on its roof and laughed at the drowned world. We were the only bird not to sing at the crucifixion. Magpies bore into sheep and cattle and eat them from the inside out. Magpies steal anything that shines. Witches ride to their seething Sabbaths on magpie’s tails. To make a magpie talk, cut its tongue with a crooked sixpence.

This passage comes early in The Axeman’s Carnival and speaks to the strange associations sometimes attached to these birds. They are frequently perceived as an aggressive and invasive species. But they are also often attributed human qualities: greed, mischievousness, malice, humour.

Because of their intelligence and their capacity to mimic human voices and language, it becomes easy to anthropomorphise magpies. We project our own qualities onto them, reading their behaviour as a mirror of our own.

Tama (short for Tamagochi) is frequently subject to this kind of projection. Thanks to his owner, Marnie, he has become a rising internet star. Marnie films him dressed in a range of outfits, performing tricks and tasks, and........

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