Book of the Week: ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks — Acorn Prize winner!
All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures — and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women — all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward — and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.
“Poet, memoirist and scholar Ingrid Horrocks turns to fiction and crushes it. Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. Characters confront leaky rentals and sexual assault, join anti-nuclear and climate movements, while seeking many forms of love. Sparks from one story and one generation ignite elsewhere in the book, illustrating how material conditions, freedoms and ideologies can be shaped, for better or worse, by our forebears. Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction