Book of the Week: Best novel of 2025

2026-03-02 - 17:08

Huzzah to the fiction judges at this year’s Ockham NZ book awards for placing Before The Winter Ends by Wellington writer Khadro Mohamed on the longlist, because otherwise I would not have been made aware of the novel I now regard as the best work of fiction published in New Zealand in 2025. It was published last May. I only read it in February. Poor show, but better belated than never; I think it’s world-class, and hope it makes the Ockham shortlist, announced tomorrow. The book is set in Wellington, Mogadishu and Cairo. Reading its confident settings in Somalia and Egypt made it feel like a book from a publishing house in London or New York, its editors at the centre of the world and keenly, immediately aware of the Somali refugee diaspora and the stories it has of displacement, trauma, loss. In fact Tender Press are an independent publisher based in Wellington. Its editors are Ash Davida Jane, now living in Naarm (Melbourne), and Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi). Mission statement kind of thing: “We have a particular interest in work by people of colour and queer, indigenous, disabled, and otherwise marginalised writers.” They have published a dozen books, mainly poetry, including a collection by Khadro Mohamed, We’re All Made of Lightning, which won the prize for best first book of poetry at the 2024 Ockham awards. I expected a poet’s touch in the novel and it was there right from the first page. “The river, tucked in a low-hanging valley, gushes in rapids that twist and turn around his father’s skin like he’s just another stone lining its bank.” Brilliant image. There are more throughout the novel but not overwhelmingly so; there is a clear, lucid story arc, easy to follow, in the lives of a Somali mother and son who come to New Zealand after the civil war. The father is missing, presumed dead back on home soil. The mother is depressed, a shut-in, locked in her bedroom reading the Quran day and night. The son, Omar, is studying biochemistry at university. He’s a mess, too, and suffers from terrible headaches. But he’s doing his best and the one thing he knows he’s got going for him is the pride he takes in his Afro. The opening section is set in Wellington, in the winter of 2019. It rains a lot. Omar and his mum live in Newtown. He takes the 18e bus to Salamanca Rd to go to lectures. One day he sees a beautiful African girl in the lecture theatre. Omar’s world, silent and monochromatic, is suddenly alive with detail, shape, sensuality: “The girl doesn’t notice him or his staring—at least Omar hopes she doesn’t. She has on a pendant necklace in the shape of the African continent that shimmers in the low lighting of the room and sits in the centre of her chest. She wears a scarf that looks like a black and white keffiyeh, thin instead of the thick wool he’s used to seeing. It’s wrapped around her neck loosely.” Omar is such a goddamned sadsack that the girl’s arrival in the book gives you hope for a romance, for something good to happen to him. He searches for her on social media. Her name is Margrett Owsu, which suggests to Omar that she’s from Ghana. It’s about as close as he gets for a while; life plods on, as he buys groceries with his weekly Winz payment, and picks his way through the mud of McAllister Park in his Doc Martens. It rains more. “The sky makes a slow rumbling noise and rain falls in small, dispersed droplets.” There’s a tender, fascinating set-piece when Omar and his best friend Nick make lunch for two men from a local mosque, who come to read the Quran to Omar’s mother. “She just needs help healing,” he tells the men (Mohamed writes they are from Damascus, and raised in “Mangere”; the book fails to macronise it as Māngere). “When they are done reading the Quran, Mohamed and Sami close their books and lift their palms. The duas they say are entirely in Arabic.” It’s the most action-packed thing to happen in Before the Winter Ends in the opening 100 pages; Mohamed is faithful to the inertia and confusion of her characters, and their quotidian lives. They cook. They clean. They come in out of the rain. There’s another fairly active set-piece when Margrett (actually from Zambia) invites Omar to a party in Aro Valley. I wasn’t sure about the accuracy of the directions. “He got the number 3 bus in Newtown ... He got off on Willis St, where he waited for the 25 and rode it through unfamiliar suburbs.” Really? It sounds more like he’s headed for Highbury, not Aro Valley; it’s the simplest thing in the world to walk down Willis St and turn into Aro St, that long main drag of dismal Aro Valley. No matter. Mohamed takes you around the party, gives you its feeling, its dynamics, its possibilities. Margrett vapes. Omar watches moths hit a naked lightbulb. “They stay silent, the night enveloping them, the moths’ wings creating tiny shadows that flutter across his skin ... She stays next to him, blowing out another puff of mango, her arm against his.” The sexiness segues into the book’s second section, set in 1999, when Omar’s parents, Yasser and Asha, fall in love. The tone of the book and the physical detail are suddenly brighter. The pages glow with sunlight, scented with jasmine, tasting of fresh mango. Yasser and Asha meet at her market stall in Mogadishu. He asks her out. Their first date is sitting beneath a sumac tree in full bloom. Mohamed foreshadows the civil war to come: “The clashes between rebel groups ... cleared the entire market for the past few days. They took advantage of the lull and planted themselves in the shade, among the bright red berries that littered the grass.” All of her writing about Mogadishu, and then Cairo, where Yasser takes his reluctant wife to live, brings the places, and the book, thrillingly alive. They feel familiar on the page; it’s Wellington that feels foreign. The book becomes a love story. I loved this line, from Asha’s mother: “You look at him like he’s hung the moon.” And then it becomes a war story. “There’s fire everywhere; the earth is scorched. Screams slice through the air.” The book’s central tragedy takes place off the page. But Mohamed later confronts it directly in a powerful chapter. “The blood leaves him in rivers.” Yasser becomes just another stone in the bank. The past returns to the present when Omar decides to shake his mum out of her depression by taking her to Cairo (on a Winz benefit?), and the story arc lightly touches on a sense of resolution and peace. “The entire courtyard is bathed in bright orange ... The Adan rings out over the houses.” Asha is home. Omar, though, dreams of Wellington, and smells its seawater and seaweed. Wonderful book. Huzzah, foremost, to Tender Press—in three years they have made a significant contribution to New Zealand publishing, and Before the Winter Ends is a particular triumph—and to the author. Her novel rises out of damp Wellington into the swirling heart and dust of Africa, taking you there almost every step of the way. Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.