Mishi's Gift

"My name is Jacob. I am South African. I have come here to kill a man," Jacob whispered at the angry ocean as he sat on Muriwai Beach, a place of wild surf and screaming winds. This is the very arse end of the world, he thought. Black sand, black mood, black arse, he chuckled. And as Jacob plans the murder of the white policeman who raped his wife back in the final, violent days of South African Apartheid, he meets Shelly, a local woman fighting her own enemy- cancer; and as she is dragged into Jacob's world of madness, Shelly knows that like the giant surf at Muriwai, his insanity is capable of drowning her. Following a long career in education, Rob Allen is now emerging as a genuine New Zealand author, and the settings and characters, in his four novels to date, reflect that. He has a distinct voice and his style is as stripped bare and as craggy as the cliff faces of Muriwai, the setting for his first novel, MIshi's Gift. He lives in Auckland and is passionate in his love for New Zealand; its places, people, landscape; and believes it to be a naturally spiritual place. Mishi's Gift was Rob Allen's first novel. It is a gritty New Zealand story of loss and hatred, fear and courage, black and white. At times brutal, in other parts tender, it explores the key concept of what it means to forgive, and to risk loving again.