Distant minds

In his latest novel, a Kiwi author is interested in secrets, control and our inability to truly communicate with others.

- JOSIE SHAPIRO

Bryan Walpert's previous novel, the brilliant time-travel love story Entanglement, was shortlisted for the fiction prize at the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

His latest treads different ground but works in a similar style: erudite prose untangling deeply intelligent ideas, with the bonus of carefully drawn characters.

Empathy opens with a thriller-type scenario. Edward Geller — grandfather, widower and a chemist who creates perfumes for a fragrance company - has been kidnapped. His science-teacher son David, who moved his family back to his childhood home after his mother's death a few years earlier, is also recently widowed, and he's desperate to find his father.

David loves to be in control, and lately he has felt “like he was perpetually stationed in front of the door to their lives with a sword, preventing chaos from entering”. After a mysterious phone call, David realises there might be more to his father’s case than the police file suggests. He decides to investigate his father’s disappearance, with the ghost of his wife Molly gently haunting and encouraging him to break out of his comfort zone.

A secondary storyline that weaves through the novel concerns Alison Morris, an executive at a corporate perfume company, and her husband Jim, an aspiring video-game developer who is miserable working as a low-level employee at a software company.