Remote Sympathy: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. She lives in Ngāruawāhia and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

"Highly original and deeply researched, Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy is a powerful and disturbing study in terrible lies and the human need to believe them. The setting is the Nazi “labor” camp Buchenwald in the final years of World War II. The horrific is made ordinary with the focus on the small family of the fictional camp administrator, SS Dietrich Hahn, his dying wife Greta and son Karl-Heinz. To save his much-loved Greta, Hahn orders Dr. Leonard Weber, inventor of an electrotherapy contraption, the Sympathetic Vitaliser, to attend her. Weber lies about the impossible life-saving power of the Vitaliser, Hahn lies about the fates of Weber’s Jewish wife Anna and daughter Lotte. The interlocking betrayals, dangerous deceptions, and hopeless hopes gather strength. Few readers will close the covers of this book unshaken."