Facing Galapagos

by Craig Cliff

An award-winning short story from the 2011 Commonwealth Prize Best First Book.It’s not every day you receive an email at work from someone claiming to be 'the' Charles Darwin. But when David Leon emails back, little does he suspect that before long he would be heading to Ecuador, or indeed that he would be mugged by a man wielding an iguana like a sawn-off shotgun. But what has David really gone in search of? This wry, whimsical story is refreshingly different and thought-provoking.One of the stories from a superb collection of which one reviewer 'Simply the best new collection of short stories I have read in an age.'

33 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 5, 2013

About the author

Craig Cliff’s debut collection of short stories, A MAN MELTING, was published in July 2010. It was named as one of the best books of 2010 by the New Zealand Listener and the Sunday Star Times, and went on to win the overall Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize. According to the judges, A MAN MELTING “is of the moment, and is rightly at home on a global platform. Cliff is a talent to watch and set to take the literary world by storm."

Craig wrote a column for the Dominion Post newspaper from 2010-2014 about his double life as a writer and a public servant (and, later, as a father).

THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS, a dark and wide-ranging historical novel, was published in August 2013. According to the New Zealand Listener, "it’s tremendous, darkly entertaining and original from start to finish." Editions have also been published in Romania (2016), the US (2017) and the UK (2019).

NAILING DOWN THE SAINT, a novel about Hollywood, fatherhood and levitation, was published in 2019.