Loop Tracks

By: Sue Orr

Narrated by: Vanessa Rhodes

Winner of the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

It’s 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again.

Loop Tracks is a major New Zealand novel, written in real time against the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum in 2020.

©2022 Sue Orr (P)2022 Spotify Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Loop Tracks is an urgent and unexpected novel about freedom and responsibility – about a woman forced to wear her solitary and unsupported choice as a puzzling mistake, and about the very present past that she must face to help her family and herself." —Elizabeth Knox

"This fictional inter-generational story will speak to a wide readership about the choices that are important for our future." —Dame Margaret Sparrow

A moment in time

Beautifully written, and a story that unfolds slowly and gently, with rich detail that had me right in the moment - Wellington New Zealand just before and then during the start of the pandemic. It was refreshing hearing a story clearly written for Kiwis, assuming we’d get the references. I started listening to this thinking it would centre on the early life of the protagonist, but that’s actually a small part. It instead follows her as she unpicks the looping of family trauma started all those years ago. It gets better the more I think about it.