Chaired by Victoria Purman

CW: Discussion of abortion. A bestseller in Sue Orr’s New Zealand, Loop Tracks is complex, nuanced and compassionate. Written in real time against the progress of COVID, it opens in Auckland in 1978 as Charlie waits to board a flight to Australia to have an abortion, the sole NZ clinic recently closed. When the plane is delayed on the tarmac, she makes an impulsive choice, the consequences of which are profound. We learn of Charlie then, and in contemporary COVID NZ, where she lives with her grandson and the spectre of her troubled stranger of a son.