Stories that Sing—and Sting
By Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb | Posted: Wednesday Oct 21, 2026
Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn (Otago University Press, 2024)
This considered collection of short stories by Kirsty Gunn is dark, intricate and unnerving. This is the inaugural title in the Landfall Tauraka series of short story collections, published by Dunedin-based Otago University Press. Gunn, a New Zealand writer based in Scotland, publishes novels and short stories internationally. These powerful stories, as tart and sharp as the green apples on the exquisite cover, delve into the yearnings, triumphs, jealousies, thrills and disappointments of characters that quickly capture your attention and curiosity: how much can a person bear?
The first and last stories are shocking, complex and fascinating explorations of two women, behaving in utterly unexpected ways. The first, 'Blood Knowledge', is a slowly chilling tale whose narrator informs you in the first sentence “There was something wrong with the garden.” and then proceeds to show and tell you just what and who is curdling in this domestic Eden. The last story 'All Gone', allows you to think you know what this story is, building towards a terrible end, and then you are there: the ending, a visceral last horror heaped on horror, makes you gasp out loud, with the shock and pain of the twist.
These two stories bookend eleven tales that are just as interesting, varied and complex. They are set in the UK and NZ. There is drama, cruelty, humour, landscapes that sing Aotearoa, from mist-wreathed Te Urewera to sun-bleached Wairarapa. Towns, friendships, families and people roil with loves and antagonisms. All of this told in stories just a few pages long, in Gunn’s clear, compelling and rather beautiful prose. Gunn’s characters have repressed emotions, inchoate thoughts and unusual behaviours that often seem mysterious and beyond their agency to ameliorate – the author sometimes shows us motives, reasons for the bruised tender places or the scarred-over feelings that no longer feel, but her characters seem resigned, authors of their own fates, unaware of the Author.
Several of the stories feature asides about writing or publishing, acknowledging the Author’s role in conjuring these characters and stories – these are made artefacts, the reader’s emotions and thoughts being manipulated by the Author as much as the characters on the pages. Gunn’s characters are utterly believable, the stories set in New Zealand grounded in a particularly New Zild mode of communication, laconic and spare, that masks aggression and happiness equally, until spectacularly, a violent emotion erupts through, sometimes in actual violence. There is tension humming in the unsaid things and silent spaces. Then Gunn flips things and invites us to a London literary party in 'Praxis, OrWhy Joan Collins is Important', bubbling with the joy of ideas and creation, of having a party to celebrate a book of all things, the story is funny and light, enjoying the pomp of an Event, and gently skewering, so sharply, the denizens of this sparkly world. The Afterword is a sort of meta present to the reader as the Author considers all her Pretties, and their ugliness.
A number of the stories, or something very like them, have previously appeared elsewhere but this gathering of stories together, and their pleasing, deceptively natural arrangement one against another is deeply satisfying – they’ve polished each other up, jostling in the same kete. Characters don’t repeat themselves story to story but they could, the universe of Pretty Ugly is pleasingly coherent and deep, the stories coiled quietly amongst each other.
Otago University Press published Pretty Ugly in 2024. In late 2026 it is on the shelves at, or available to order from, your local bookseller.
Find this book and over 3000 others in the Dunedin City of Literature Collection at Dunedin Public Libraries.
Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb worked in independent bookshops in Aotearoa and the UK for over 34 years, as a bookseller and book buyer. She lives and reads in Dunedin.
