Dirty Work
With its stink of life, its compassion and vitality, its vivid gallery of rogues, hoons, dreamers and eccentrics, Dirty Work deserves to be read. DOMINION 1987
This is an excellent book
Nigel Cox writes simply and directly, with compassion and humour. Dirty Work can take its place on any bookshelf of good contemporary New Zealand fiction.
OTAGO DAILY TIMES 1988
Cox ends his author's note [2006 edition] saying Dirty Work was "the book that made me think I could write". Indeed he can - superbly, leaving subsequent residue aplenty in this reader's consciousness.
Chris Barton NZ HERALD
Welcome to the Happy World Hotel!
Gina Tully - amateur acrobat, woman of conscience and manager of a bottom-of-the-cliff residential hotel - has to balance her ideas about how the world should be with her need to keep her job, as the economic reforms of the mid-1980s start to tell on societys most vulnerable. But Gina - confused, bold, sly - journeys beyond the merely political, and what emerges is a celebration of human resilience and the need for intimacy and compassion.
First published in 1987, Nigel Coxs celebrated second novel was shortlisted for New Zealands two major book awards, won the Bucklands Memorial Literary Prize, and was optioned for film.
