Your cart is empty 
Past Perfect is a story of love and loss, prejudice and resolution, as well as the search for selfhood.
Prompted by a brush with mortality, her children approaching adulthood and the relationship with her husband being tested, Sue Spencer embarks on a search for meaning in her life–for a better sense of who she might be.
Her quest takes her to to Akaroa, to France and back, tracing her genealogy, but her discoveries are unexpected and place further pressure on strained family relationships.
Set in modern day Christchurch and France, with a backdrop of the 1840 French settlement of Akaroa, the novel is enriched by the diversity and complexity that make up our past.
Karen Zelas lives in quake-struck Christchurch. A former psychiatrist and sychotherapist, she returned to university, taking creative writing papers at Canterbury University in preparation for giving up her day job. Since 2004, her poetry has been increasingly widely published within New Zealand, including in Landfall, Poetry New Zealand and Takahē, and broadcast on radio. It has also appeared in Australian ezines Snorkel and Eclecticism and recently been blogged by Interlitq (UK). Several anthologies contain her work. Her first novel Past Perfect was published by Wily Publications in 2010, and was released in ebook editions by Interactive Publications this year. Having an interest in the visual presentation of poetry, Karen participated, in April 2007, in an exhibition entitled feathers unfettered, featuring her series of poems about native birds of New Zealand. The exhibition was mounted with artist Galina Kim and quilter Sue Spigel, in Christchurch. In 2009, she was the recipient of a Creative Communities grant. Karen is editor of the anthology Crest to Crest: Impressions of Canterbury, prose and poetry (Wily Publications, 2009). For the last five years, Karen has been Fiction Editor of Takahē literary magazine and chairs the Takahē Collective Board. She is married with children, grandchildren and child-substitute: a miniature poodle.
Sneak Preview
