Sam Coley

“They say you can never go home again, except here I am at nine in the morning, still a bit drunk, still in the suit I wore yesterday, gunning one-forty up Sate Highway One, headed north, headed for the Cape, home again and getting away.”

After three years working in Dubai, Alex Preston has returned home to New Zealand to bury his estranged parents after their death in a car accident. Reluctant to return to his childhood home in Auckland following the funeral, Alex, accompanied by his show more twin sister, Amy, impulsively decides to drive to Cape Reinga, New Zealand’s northernmost point. On reaching it he is reminded of a promise made to Amy to one day travel to Stewart Point together, and with only two weeks til Alex must once again leave, they recklessly decide to follow the State Highway One all the way to New Zealand’s southernmost point.

Sam Coley presents a poignant journey undertaken amid a miasma of grief, confusion and anger in his remarkable debut, State Highway One. It’s a story that explores the themes of home, family, identity, and dispossession as the close confines of the car gives rise to reminisces, recriminations and regrets.

Though the focus is on the emotional progress of the twins, as is common to many a road trip, particularly spontaneous ones, the siblings experience unexpected obstacles, unplanned detours, and breakdowns during their adventure.

Coley, it seems, knows New Zealand well. As the twins travel south, we are given glimpses of the island nation - sprawling cities and tiny towns, dense bushland and fallow farmland, rugged coast side cliffs, and raging oceans. Alex’s iPod provides a carefully curated virtual soundtrack (which you can listen to on Spotify).

With evocative writing, superb characterisation, and tender insight State Highway One is a deserved winner of 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. show less

I was not born in NZ but have lived most of my life here. SH1 has always captured my imagination in a way that other roads in other countries never have.

Why is the Desert Road so iconic?

When i read the Maori belief that when they die their spirit goes up to Cape Reinga then I could not help but believe that their spirits travelled up there on SH1.

This is what led me to this book but staying with the book was harder than I imagined.

I tried to give up on this book so many times but failed show more ......dunno what it was but I kept coming back, had the feeling that it was going somewhere in spite of the seemingly endless small town drama and repetition.

But, it did go somewhere and I'm glad I missed the twist at the end because when it came it made it all make sense and only then did I realise just what a powerful story this was. show less