The Deck

A novel about telling stories in a time of change.

During a time of plague and profound social collapse, a group of friends escape to a house in the country where they entertain themselves by playing music, eating, drinking and telling stories about their lives.

The Deck borrows the motifs of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Decameron, to tell the story of another small group gathered in a bay on Banks Peninsula during a time, a little way off in the future, of contagion and global catastrophe. What is the role of fiction, this novel asks, as civilisation falters? What is the point of inventing stories when reality so eclipses what we can imagine?