Party Boy

Book Author Breton Dukes
Rights Available World excl. NZ 

Marco is stressed. On one hand, he’s a cook in a progressive city bar, a married father of three, doing all he can to raise his boys right. On the other (slightly burnt) hand, his life is chaos. Every day seems full of cruel and unusual obstacles, from temperamental arancini to a car breakdown at the worst possible time. Painkillers and booze can only do so much to protect him from the fallout of his adolescence – the bullying, the fear, the things that were done to him and the things he did.

Now his fiftieth birthday is approaching, and all the ghosts of his life are invited to the party. It feels like his last chance, though he isn’t sure for what.

About the Author

Breton Dukes is the author of three acclaimed short story collections: What Sort of Man (2020), Empty Bones (2014) and Bird North (2011). He has worked in hospitals, language schools, gymnasiums, bars, kitchens, factories and government call centres, and has received the Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary. He lives with his wife and three children in Dunedin.

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Description

Publisher
Te Herenga Waka University Press

Extent
224pp

Format
210mm x 138mm

Binding
Paperback

Category
Fiction

Genre
Contemporary Fiction

Publication Date
February 2026

Rights Available:
World excl. NZ

Rights Agents:

World
Holly Hunter
holly.hunter@vuw.ac.nzz

Contact Te Herenga Waka University Press
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“A novel I’ve been hoping for! Party Boy is a shock of a book about damaged males, about being a father, a husband, a son, an idiot, someone trying to make amends. Somehow it manages to be both pulse-rattling and poetic, and from its daring mix of comedy and terror, what arrives is finally a deeply affecting portrait of a man on the edge.”

Damien Wilkins, author of Delirious

“A powerful new novel that is almost certainly destined to be one of the year’s best, maybe the very best.”

Fergus Porteous, ReadingRoom

“As unsettling as it is compelling, Party Boy is the type of book that lingers. Not because it comforts, but because it refuses to look away.”

Tineke Buser, Regional News

“There is no excess, no fat. Dukes’s prose is all lean muscle and sinew.”

John Prins, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

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