Marco in extremis

By Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb | Posted: Friday May 15, 2026

Party Boy by Breton Dukes (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026)

This is a really interesting debut novel from masterly short story writer Breton Dukes – turns out, he’s pretty good at novels too. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking, urgent and brutal, funny and touching, a perceptive look at how the events of our youth follow us into adulthood, and how men may be ill-served, curdled and trapped, by certain myths of masculinity, mate-ship and expectation. Several parts are almost perfect little short stories, nestled like plums within the larger work, detailed and well observed slices of a life that may be careening out of its usual tracks. Marco is planning a big fiftieth birthday party, with splendid meats, intricate salads, homemade breads, wonderful wines, sumptuous pavlova and lashings of champagne. Marco wants desperately that all the disparate parts and people of his life will meet up and he will finally be seen in his totality, parts of which he’s deliberately concealed from different people in his life. He seems driven to provoke this self-exposure but sometimes is uneasy about what he has set in motion and what will result. At least there’ll be great food and drink. And an excellent playlist.

A father of three small boys and mostly in charge of running the household, Marco works a couple of days a week as a cook at a city bar that is inclusive and progressive. He is married to Michelle and for a while now they’ve been living back in his home town of Dunedin after some years away – their house sounds lovely. He’s likeable, relatable, a little familiar. He seems like a nice guy, likes to be liked, worries that he isn’t.

We slowly become aware that Marco has some dark high school memories to (not) deal with, and that someone has recently contacted him, wanting to discuss that long ago time. Dukes has structured the book between Marco’s present and glimpses of the teenage Marco at his conservative Boy’s High School and then at university. Good at rugby, sure of his place, the sort of boy the school is proud of, Marco had found the transition to a less structured world with a plethora of ideas to explore somewhat difficult.
Thirty plus years later, Marco is stressed enough from life as usual --wrangling the kids and money and keeping all the various parts of himself together as a presentable whole and working hard in the busy, edge-of-chaotic kitchen and wondering if Michelle still loves him and is he really about to be fifty?-- and is quite unbalanced by the idea of the possible excavation of a past that he does not wish to examine but which he can no longer look away from.

Dukes is adept at building the tension from seemingly everyday scenes, as Marco starts to drop a few balls, and small mistakes – not following the usual kitchen prep, forgetting to check the petrol in the car before school pickup, profligate spending – blossom into chaotic slightly dangerous situations. Marco is frightened by thoughts of the past nudging into the present and also slightly frightening in his impulsive, ill-considered flailing responses to his sense that his world is being existentially threatened --he is in grave difficulty. The three small boys are a beautifully observed counterpoint to their father’s turmoil, they are funny and irritating, trusting and suspicious by turns – Marco loves them, and is loved by them. We can see from the reactions of people around him that actually Marco is cared about, but he can’t quite see it, he feels, deep down, undeserving, he’s done things, had things done to him that he has not confronted –will the party with its further revelations, shocks and resolutions provide catharsis or will everyone just eat and drink well?

Party Boy was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in early 2026. It is available in bookshops and libraries.

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.