Here’s a potential sleeper hit novel with a strong New Zealand connection: Louise Wareham’s Since You Ask. Finding myself with a few hours to spare in a delightful bach in Mangawhai, I picked up the book and tore through it in two successive nights. That’s something of a record for me, so I reckon the book deserves mention.

Wareham is a Wellington girl, but she moved to Sydney at age six and New York at 12. She graduated from Columbia College and then snared the 1999 James Jones Literary Award for Best First Novel. (Nope, I've never heard of that award, either.)

Things have now come full circle: Wareham came back to Godzone and was in the Class of 2003 for Victoria Uni’s MA in Creative Writing course. She now lives in Welly once again, and Since You Ask has been slowly but steadily gathering acclaim in New Zealand.

It's a strangely gripping and often uncomfortable read. It recounts the tale of Betsy, an adolescent New Yorker ensnared in an uneasy sexual triangle created by her junkie brother, her first lover, and that lover’s shady and manipulative boss.

A brief flirtation with an older married man offers a chance of escape, but this crumbles and leaves Betsy in an even more emotionally precarious state. She ends up in the institutional care of a charismatic doctor, and it is from this conversational viewpoint that we learn much of the story.

I won’t dissect the plot - it’s not a crash-bang-wallop kinda book – but it’s extremely readable, even more so considering the subject matter. The sideways observations are spot-on, creating an occasional air of pathos, and the drug experiences are equally accurate. It feels real, but I sincerely hope it isn’t.

Janet McAllister, writing in last weekend’s Canvas magazine, said of Wareham:

Her matter-of-fact voice makes this debut novel a lighter read than subject matter might indicate, and it clips along at a fair pace.

It does indeed. Wareham’s style is dry and spare, almost banal - reminding me of another enjoyable recent read, Damon Galgut’s Booker-nominated The Good Doctor. It appears that I’m not alone: Fiona Kidman, reflecting on her best books of 2004, said:

… my 'find' was Louise Wareham's Since You Ask (Akashic), an intense examination of family dynamics gone astray in contemporary New York, and the central character's search for sanity, in a world where money is everything and nothing. Such spare and spine-tingling prose.

Like The Good Doctor, Since You Ask drifts to a somewhat unsettling halt rather than going out with a bang. Unless you’re a Tom Clancy fan, you can probably handle that.

So yes, you guessed: this one’s highly recommended.