Cynthia can understand how Anahera feels just by looking at her body.

Cynthia is twenty-one, bored and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. With stolen money and a dog in tow they run away and buy 'Baby', an old boat docked in the Bay of Islands, where Cynthia dreams they will live in a state of love. But strange events on an empty island turn their life together in a different direction.

Baby is a sunburnt psychological thriller of obsession and escape by one of the most exciting new voices in New Zealand fiction.

Winner of the 2018 Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction



'Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of New Zealander Annaleese Jochems's assured debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coteries of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction ... There are echoes here of Megan Abbott, Emma Cline, Zoe Heller and Miranda July- writers drawn to the intricacies and ferocious possibilities of female friendship. There's a dollop, too, of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley; a dash of Lord of the Flies. What Jochems adds is a cloying grotesqueness. Baby is a novel of close-quarters living- of masticating mouths and human stink; of piss and vomit, sunburn and bruises, pimples and dandruff; of new fat expanding under the skin. A novel of bodies.'
-Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

'It's easy to see why this dark comic thriller has been compared to works by queen of the genre Patricia Highsmith.'
-Elle

'From page one, Baby is a dryly funny study of a young woman driven to shocking acts by what seems like boredom and lust alone, devoid of any semblance of a conscience ... Come to Baby for a full-blown psychopath who makes you laugh out loud despite your horror.'
-Rebecca Varcoe, The Saturday Age