The Black Monk
Charlotte Grimshaw’s powerful new fiction for 2026
The Black Monk has been described by Rachael King in The Spinoff as “mind-bending, impressionistic, genius.”
“A psychologically unsparing novel…Grimshaw’s long and complex project, to create a series of social novels that mirror contemporary New Zealand life, has reached a kind of event horizon with The Black Monk.” Philip Matthews – Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
“Charlotte Grimshaw has written a novel of remarkable complexity that makes demands on the reader….an elegiac novel… But while The Black Monk’s plot may be devious in method…the novel’s images are sensuous, tactile and crystalline.” – Elizabeth Smither, The Landfall Tauraka Review
“While going back and forwards in time, following connections and spirals of thought, it still has coherence and moves forward at a cracking pace. I find it deeply moving, intellectually exciting, politically provocative and psychologically intriguing. The lines between reality and fiction will keep readers guessing but turning that into a theme is a triumph.” – Harriet Allan on The Black Monk
“The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have long preoccupied Charlotte Grimshaw. Her 2021 memoir The Mirror Book was published to acclaim and controversy, with Grimshaw’s account of her childhood casting shadows on the sunny public version of her upbringing given by her parents, writer CK Stead and the late Kay Stead. Her latest work, The Black Monk, continues this thread in a complex, layered novel that examines how different versions of ‘truth’ can coexist…
“… as the book goes on, there are moments of exquisiteness, such as in Ōwhiro Bay where ‘the sea lashed and gnawed at the rocks, and the wind traced patterns on the winter swell’, and ‘metallic curtains of rain’ swept across the water.
“The Black Monk is both highly perceptive and unreservedly ambiguous, and the reader must be willing to navigate the mirror maze in all its uncertainty. The novel asks what truth means for the writer, for the family, and for the political world.” — Kete Books
