Slow Down, You’re Here Is The Latest Novel From Award-winning Wellington Novelist, Brannavan Gnanalingam

The novel centres on Kavita, who is stuck in a dead-end marriage. A parent of two small kids, she is the family’s main breadwinner. An old flame unexpectedly offers her a week away in Waiheke. If she were to go, she’s not sure when - or if - she’d come back.

“I’m fascinated by the way people interact, and how the accumulation of small moments can have significant consequences. This is a book structured around dread and horror, but I’ve also thrown in elements of romantic comedies, satire, social realism, and thrillers into the mix,” says Brannavan Gnanalingam.

Gnanalingam's previous novel, Sprigs, was nominated for numerous awards including the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel, while featuring on many critics end of year lists.

“Slow Down, You're Here is a pacey book full of love and desperation. Gnanalingam has a gift for realist fiction that is so real that it gives the reader an entirely new view on what might have been considered all too familiar. What Sprigs did for the toxic politics of a private boys’ school to light, this new novel does for Auckland city, from Ōnehunga to Waiheke," says Murdoch Stephens of the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective.

Just released, and COVID-19 permitting, a launch will be held in Wellington in May along with Down from Upland by Stephens.

The cover of Slow Down, You're Here features a stunning photograph from artist Dilohana Lekamge.

Brannavan Gnanalingam (1983-) is a novelist and lawyer, based in Wellington. He’s written seven novels, including Sprigs (2020) and Sodden Downstream (2017), both shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and the long-listed A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (2016). Gnanalingam is a regular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times, and was a former film and music reviewer (including winning a Qantas Media Award in 2009 with the Lumière Reader).

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