Deep Breathing

Plot

This novel introduces us to a changed world, a world of the future. Nuclear 'accidents', giant waves and rising oceans, earthquakes and eruptions have swept away much of Before. A small group of survivors clings to life in Antarctica, thinking themselves the only people left on earth.

A faint radio signal, picked up by chance, suddenly indicates there might be intelligent life elsewhere. Leaving her icy homeland, Radia Komalski sails the southern oceans for seventy days before making landfall. Rather than finding the 'irradiated landscape populated by mutants' predicted by some of her folk, she finds human survivors living in communities scattered about what is to her an abundant land. It is the islands of Aotearoa, once the northern half of New Zealand.

Travelling with the Roadwomen, a nomadic band of healers, and Siwa, a twelve-year-old with strange powers of vision, Radia visits some of these communities - Rainy Spring's Tribe, the Christians at Redemption, the healing centre at Rotorua - and has to adjust many of her ways of thinking. When she ventures alone into the strangely vibrant Northland, it is to experiences beyond the realm of ordinary perception. She discovers powers of her own she has never dreamed of - and her life is set in a new direction.