Blurb:
One day the postal services will turn a buck by using drones to deliver fake Rolexes to citizen slackers on a universal income. But for now, the mail team continues busting arse delivering gym membership promotions to retirement villages. Adopting an attitude of resignation offers comfort to some, but one worker, inspired by Ned Ludd, Marx, and the Unabomber, opts for sabotage. Both comic and absurd, Smoko is a social realist novel set in the depths of New Zealand suburbia.
Smoko:
Noun, informal, Australian and New Zealand English
Variations: smoke-ho, smoke-o
Definition: A rest from work for a smoke, snack, or hot drink.
See also: morning tea
Epigraph:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’
Expected publication date: 14 November 2024. Want a copy? Just let me know.