is an intimate and evocative memoir in three parts. ‘Double Unit’ tells the story of Maurice Gee’s parents—Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man’s man. ‘Blind Road’ is Gee’s story up to the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship as a writer began. ‘Running on the Stairs’ tells the story of Margaretha Garden, beginning in 1940, the year of her birth, when she travelled with her mother Greta from Nazi-sympathising Sweden to New Zealand, through to her meeting Maurice Gee when they were working together in the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1967.