NZ Listener Best Books List 2025. Josie Shapiro’s second novel moves from LA to the Coromandel, exploring heartbreak and dark secrets, friendship and homecoming. It’s also an ode to taking risks no matter the consequences.
After the death of their young daughter, Penny Whittaker and Adam Riggs are struggling. Penny’s lifelong dream of becoming a successful artist has stalled, and Riggs, battling an addiction to prescription painkillers, is coming to grips with the end of his glittering professional skateboarding career. When Penny is unexpectedly offered a chance to exhibit her work at an Auckland gallery, she accepts, despite her reservations.
‘Shapiro has proved herself a masterful storyteller, able to create lived-in characters specific enough they are universal, relatable, pitiable and even galling’, notes Claire Mabey in The Spinoff.
Sally Blundell writes, ‘Shapiro is a skilled storyteller, drawing her characters with a light but empathetic hand, carefully spooling out the details of the ‘hard parts’ – the barely spoken-about events that pulled Jamie, Riggs and Penny together then split them apart – that now, two decades later, will unravel in a stormy, tequila-fuelled, candlelit night in a rundown bach on the Coromandel’ in Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books.
‘Shapiro’s writing is artful and assured, and Good Things Come and Go is a heartfelt exploration’, writes Clare Travaglia in Kete.
