Blurb

(If I had a back cover, this is what I’d put on it…)

A tiny deconsecrated church in a small Manawatu town is hosting a marriage. Li Peng, freshly arrived from Singapore is - to the amazement of friends and family - marrying Joshua, an Englishman lately resident in South Sudan. Meanwhile, in Santiago, a young barista nervously packs to fly to New Zealand, to rendezvous with a Zimbabwean chicken farmer in Taumarunui. This, they are sure, is the place to achieve true, enduring love.

Flocks of foreign lovebirds have suddenly descended on provincial New Zealand, causing strident debates in the Eketahuna Community Board and the Bishop of Nelson to condemn the “Rash of Rushed Romances”.

But the tractor truly encounters the ditch when a vicious Russian mobster sends representatives to Wellington in the hope of filching the secret of cracking cryptocurrency wallets from AMG, a small local software house.

Invasion of Lovebirds is a story of love, lust, amateur poetry, artificial intelligence and the existential micro-seconds of destiny that brings these forces together and threaten world-war three.

Accidentally caught between lovebirds and mobsters, our heroes - among them a sex-working accountant, a one handed-civil servant and a bisexual R&D manager - must discover the secret behind the perplexing love-pandemic infecting the provinces of Aotearoa and, in the process, learn for themselves about the true nature of love.