Dead Ends (Samantha Byres, UQP)

Is closure possible, or is it just a convenient fiction? This is the central question explored in Dead Ends, the meditative debut novel by Aotearoa New Zealand–born Naarm/Melbourne-based writer Samantha Byres. In this contemporary noir, Byres speaks powerfully to our highly exploitable human need to reshape difficult or evasive truths into neat, palatable narratives. The novel follows Nell, a thirty-something queer woman summoned back to her ‘dog’s arse hometown’ in New Zealand to care for her estranged mother. Still haunted by the unsolved death of her best friend April when they were teenagers, and the decades-old disappearance of her aunt Heather, Nell spirals into destructive old patterns as she reconnects with the townsfolk. When a travelling TV psychic named Petronella promises to ‘solve’ the mysteries of the missing girls, Nell is drawn into the spectacle and forced to confront long-buried guilt – both her own and the town’s. Byres is less concerned with tidy resolutions than with the emotional residue of unanswered questions. Dead Ends offers a poignant reflection on how grief endures: even when answers are offered or justice emerges, the threads of grief still haunt us. The novel suggests it may be more honest – and ultimately more healing – to accept life’s inherent messiness rather than force meaning where it doesn’t belong. Dead Ends will appeal to fans of Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light for its depiction of complicated families and deep emotion, and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa for its exploration of how teenage experiences impact adult life.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Melissa Mantle is a bookseller with a master's degree in literature. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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