AWW22 Loop Tracks - Sue Orr

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.