Oracles & Miracles & Zombies

The best-selling novel about twin girls growing up in New Zealand is back - with zombies!

We all know about the zombie virus that ravaged New Zealand between the two world wars, but little has been written about how the biters it created affected the lives of women, especially working-class women. Stevan Eldred-Grigg's best-selling novel about twin sisters growing up during the depression has been updated by Helen Mae Innes to include the previously ignored and despised minority, zombies.

A black comedy, the story shows us how the sisters, their sharp and shrewd mother and many other women struggle to avoid being bitten by biters, care gingerly for hunches who don't want to eat their brains (yet) and watch as the 'cured' lurkers start to take their jobs.

Even in times of pandemics girls still grow up, worry about boys, go out to work, get married and have babies, all while trying to keep their brains safe inside their skulls. At the beginning the twins are small, fearful and helpless. By the end of the story they're armed and ready to go after the enemy.

But who is the real enemy?

A novel about survival in extraordinary times, Oracles and Miracles and Zombies is an inspiration to women of all generations.

Stevan Treleaven Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist and historian. He was born in the Grey Valley, New Zealand in 1952 and grew up in the small mining town of Blackball and the suburbs of Christchurch. He graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1975 with an MA in history before obtaining a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1978.

Helen Mae Innes is a teacher of the English language, copywriter, and writer. She grew up in the Hutt Valley but lived in Japan, England, Ireland, China and travelled through 30 countries before returning to live in Wellington and then finally back to the Hutt. She studied linguistics and psychology and received her PhD in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington in 2021.