Shock tactics

Post-quake tales explore life beyond the shipping containers.

- WENDY PARKINS

SIGNS OF LIFE, by Amy Head (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) 

At a time when "pandemic plots" are featuring more frequently in fiction, Amy Head turns to an earlier disaster, one that was local not global: the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The linked stories in her new collection examine the texture of daily life when the ordinary has been profoundly disrupted, if not entirely dismantled.

The ruins and rubble of the innercity cordon may have been the stuff of nightly news bulletins, but Head is more concerned with the shipping containers, the bollards, the wonky paths and abandoned houses of the suburbs where people are trying to carry on, navigating their way without the landmarks that used to orient their lives. "I'm all right as long as I'm upright," one character says, articulating what many in these stories embody: a persistence that is not quite optimism but a simple desire to endure, requiring more than a hint of courage.