Catherine Chidgey - The Wish Child

Two German children caught up in their country's false dreams and corrupt ideology during the Second World War, are at the heart of The Wish Child, a new novel from Ngāruawāhia based Catherine Chidgey. Her first novel In a Fishbone Church came out in 1998, quickly followed by Golden Deeds and The Transformation published in 2003. During this time she went to Menton in southern France as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow, and won the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. Catherine also spent time in Berlin where she became interested in the war years and the collapse of Germany's hope for a glorious future. In The Wish Child Sieglinde lives a life of privilege in middle-class Berlin while Erich is brought up in rural Leipzig.