2 Apr 2025

Jenny Pattrick's new novel: Sea Change

From Nine To Noon, 11:20 am on 2 April 2025
Portrait of Jenny Pattrick and the book cover.

Photo: Deanna Walker

Amid a number of earthquakes over the past week - including the devastation in Myanmar - the release of best-selling novelist Jenny Pattrick's latest work seems particularly prescient.

In Sea Change, she imagines the devastation wreaked on a small Kapiti Coast community by a tsunami generated from a devastating rupture in the Alpine fault.

Like the characters in the book, the reader only knows a little of what's happened to the South Island.

Instead, Jenny captures the challenges and triumphs in the community's struggle for survival - and what happens when it's forced into managed retreat, eagerly pushed by a businessman with grand personal plans for the area.

Jenny Pattrick has published 10 novels since her celebrated 2003 debut novel The Denniston Rose and joins Kathryn to talk about her break from historical to contemporary writing.