LeafSalon was given a ‘taster’ version of Keri Hulme’s new offering Stonefish at the Booksellers Conference a few weeks ago, where hot publishers Huia were strutting their stuff along with the others.

This single story from Stonefish that I read is called Incubation. Written in the first person, with a puzzling first paragraph veteran Hulme readers will recognise (remember that head-scratching first chapter of The Bone People?), it moves fast into what seems to be a straightforward story.

Driving in the heat and poverty of the Far North, she stops to buy some melon to cool down, and meets an unusual couple: Rasta dad with ‘rustyblack hair in full dreads’ and ‘strange, unfinishedlooking’ infant, much older than he looks. They grow the melons, in an unconventional way that has Keri wondering about the hidden, perhaps divine talents of biological curiosities like the kid.

The feel of the setting is perfect – the northland scrub ‘crackled and fizzed with a million cicadas’ - and there are the Hulme succulent foodie descriptions. The melons are ‘celadon globes’ and she even gets some jade into the Rasta’s dreads … There are also her trademark linguistic eclecticisms that made the publishers of The Bone People do a double-take but wisely, in the end, relinquish accepted norms for Keri’s inimitable style: ‘dogstink squalor’; ‘builtin doublebunk’.

In this small taste of this much-loved writer’s new book there is a nicely, faintly creepy edge of something presque vu, almost-seen; the cousin of déjà vu – that feeling you get when you think something has moved in the corner of your eye, when the fork on the table turns briefly into a lizard and makes you yelp, or when you think you’re on the verge of a mental breakthrough but are just not quite there.

I liked it a lot. Thought maybe the stick insect was gilding the lily, mind you, but I’m seriously looking forward to more. And if I’ve referenced The Bone People too many times for you Keri, it’s just because to hear your voice again after all this time, just brings it all back. Yum.

Stonefish will be available from 24th September in a limited edition hardback for $60 or paperback from $34.95.