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if there is no shelter

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A remarkable story of a woman’s life in an unnamed city in the aftermath of a series of earthquakes. It’s written with claustrophobic, relentless and urgent conviction. What’s most compelling is how the story is gleaned mostly through flashbacks, as though, like the city’s buildings, it’s been broken into fragments and we are picking our way through rubble. Gradually, like rescue workers, we uncover the situation of a hospitalized husband, a lover lost to a building’s collapse, and the tender domestic bonds the woman shares with her father and his colleague. This is a dark, oppressive story but, through it, the writer explores how humanity responds to crisis – and has produced a metaphor for our own times.
~Michael Loveday Tracey Slaughter relates her story of guilt and grief in breathtakingly luminous fragments. These postcards from the red zone – brutal, beautiful – are a lament for what is lost, but also a reminder of what we can salvage when everything shatters. An extraordinary work; you will feel its aftershocks far beyond the final page.
~Catherine Chidgey

94 pages, Paperback

Published November 18, 2020

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Tracey Slaughter

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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Profile Image for Marcus Hobson.
711 reviews112 followers
February 16, 2021
This short novella was a runner up in the Bath Novella in Flash Award in the UK. Twenty-eight short chapters which were inspired by an information notice pinned to a wall. What to do in the event of an emergency. Such emergencies, such as earthquakes, are common in New Zealand. We even have an annual drill where people in office jobs get under their desks at a designated time of a certain day. This book contains many of the well know phrases as chapter headings, always in lower case:
alert those around you
don’t use lifts – keep left on stairs
do not attempt to return to your building until the all clear is given
know the location of all exits
leave in a calm and orderly manner
listen for official warnings.
When you hear them all like this, they do provide a natural and unique narrative, which lends itself beautifully to the way this book is structured.

The narrative starts with two instructions ‘If there is no shelter / remove yourself to a place of safety if possible’. A woman is poised to leave her marriage. The story is set in Christchurch, although it is never named, a city decimated by earthquakes and the instability of the land, which turned to liquid in many low-lying regions and brought many New Zealanders into contact with the word ‘liquefaction’ for the first time. Soft, sandy soils turned to mud, swallowing houses, cars and roads, where once there was solid ground.

This is the back drop to the story, the upheaval of the quake and the impact on the lives of everyday people. There were two quakes, one in September 2010, weakening buildings, causing havoc, but not killing anyone. Then in February 2011 the fatal quake, so much devastation. In the book we find a father, unhappy to venture back into his house, happier in his garden tent, knowing it will not collapse and harm him. Even with winter approaching.

There is so much language which is familiar to us here in New Zealand, but may not be to others. After the 2011 quakes the city was zoned with many areas designated as ‘Red Zone’, where houses were deemed too dangerous to live in. Whole streets were given a death sentence, while many long-term residents did not want to leave their homes and felt they could be rebuilt. But the land on which they sat is now too unstable. These desolate, no-go zones needed security guards to keep residents and looters out.

The story is narrated in the first person. I was convinced on the first reading that somewhere, lost in a snippet of dialogue, was a name for this narrator, but looking back over and over I cannot find it. Our unnamed narrator has written her husband a letter. An end of relationship, I’m leaving, letter. She had finished it on the day of the quake. Now her husband is in hospital, injured in the building he kept telling people didn’t feel safe. That feeling caught me, reminding me of the multi-storey hotel I stayed in after the first quake, where I could fit a finger into the crack down the wall of my tenth level bedroom. That sense of not right, not safe. That hotel that was demolished after the second quake.

We move back and forth in flashbacks to moments of an affair with the husband’s work colleague. The lust and the animal passion of it. The hotel room with plaster dust dropping from the ceilings. Now the narrator cannot get to her red zoned home to retrieve the letter. It is doomed to stay there forever, or at least until the bulldozers move in.

The chapter called ‘do not pull the emergency cord’ is one of my favourites, for those painful little details:
“I finished the letter to my husband on the day of the quake. But I’d been trying to write it for weeks. When I couldn’t find the words I would walk through the house to convince my body it was capable of leaving him. I’d watch the proof of my footprints, tacking on the remu, tracing a slowed getaway. There were only seventeen steps from the edge of our double bed to our front door. I even trekked with a suitcase, as far as the carboot, to show my left hand the grip it would need. The push off the hip to hump it into the trunk…”

Visceral details, the preparations to leave, counting the steps, rehearsing, in a complete reversal of the wedding rehearsal. Wonderful little details that make the story so very good. She was preparing to shatter everything, just before the world shattered itself.

Tracey has written the book in chunks. Chunks that repeat the broken pieces of falling masonry, the broken lives that remain. I am writing this review now as I stay for a few days in Christchurch, a week short of the tenth anniversary of the big quake. We walked along the riverside memorial this evening, reading the names of all those who lost their lives, cared into the riverbank stone, above the underlit steps down to the river, little memorials, flowers, painted stones, a birthday remembered a couple of weeks back, a vase with a dry crinkled flower stem. All painful reminders of a trauma that lurks beneath the surface of the city.

Tracey was interviewed about the flash fiction format on the Bath Flash Fiction Awards website. I think it is worth quoting what she says about the pleasures:
“…that flash can take you in a rush, plunge you into characters’ senses, keep you fed on bursts of electricity, even when life holds scant time for sustained writing. I thrive on the little fixes it gives, the short stints it lets creativity off the leash, so there’s always a quick source of exhilaration in a schedule that sometimes doesn’t leave much breathing space.”

Profile Image for Tracy Fells.
307 reviews11 followers
February 16, 2021
'if there is no shelter' is an intricate novella-in-flash, narrated by a woman surviving in a city devastated by recent earthquakes. We never learn the narrator’s name or much about her life other that her lover died in the quake, whereas her husband survived. This is a complex story told in flash segments weaving the timeline before and after the disaster. There is genuine passion and raw emotion throughout, with moments or cruel reality and then extreme tenderness. The broken landscape described mirrors the narrator’s inner state. Incredible writing from Tracey Slaughter, at times beautiful and poetic but also brutally honest.
Profile Image for Hayden  Pyke.
55 reviews
March 25, 2025
Holy heka batman, this book is good! Poetic, sharp, sad, surprising, best thing I've read all year.

Based in an unamed city after an earthquake (Christchurch, its Christchurch) the narrator, her father and a new-found flatmate navigate the post-quake city.

The characters are these full, quick moving shapes.The chapters are flash fiction at its best, short and intricate. And really, it's a love story with a shakey backdrop.
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