Published in Aotearoa New Zealand by Te Herenga Waka University Press and in Australia by UQP. Order direct from publishers’ websites or find in a good bookstore.

WINNER of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards!

‘Poet, memoirist and scholar Ingrid Horrocks turns to fiction and crushes it. Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. Characters confront leaky rentals and sexual assault, join anti-nuclear and climate movements, while seeking many forms of love. Sparks from one story and one generation ignite elsewhere in the book, illustrating how material conditions, freedoms and ideologies can be shaped, for better or worse, by our forebears. Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.’

https://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/2026-awards/winners/

One of the Spinoff’s Best Books of 2025

One of The Post’s 44 Best Books of 2025

‘a powerful collection about women’s lives that is absolutely brilliant.’ —Carole Beu, Women’s Bookshop, NZ Herald Canvas Magazine

'All Her Lives is a reckoning. A stunning tour de force of women’s lives across centuries, continents and political movements. The collection reads as a protest song book, calling through the ages for change, revolution and peace. Horrocks is one of the most powerful storytellers of our time and All Her Lives is the author's most triumphant work.’ —Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country

'A wonderful collection that swims in and out of women's lives across time, exploring the struggle for freedom and love. I'll be thinking about it for a long time - a book of quiet force.' —Emily Perkins, author of Lioness.‍ ‍

‘Horrocks’ first foray into fiction is a triumph! The stories in All Her Lives are powerful in their specificity and vast in their scope as the nine stories carry the reader across time and place. For fans of Barbara Anderson, Michelle Duff and Airini Beautrais.—The Spinoff.

‘An exquisite collection of short stories: immersive, moving, insightful.’—The Spinoff.

Reading […] All Her Lives is like slowly rotating a semi-opaque jewel: each facet polished on its own, but sometimes, through a trick of the light, you can see beyond to the mesmerising whole.

Taken together, the stories in All Her Lives give women the space to be messy, ambitious, hopeful, afraid – to want for the things already in their grasp, and for things beyond what society expects of them. —Kete Books.

‘delicate yet expansive’ ‘Horrocks’ gifted collection roves across centuries, creating fully fleshed portraits of women through a feminist lens.’ —Sydney Morning Herald

**A collection of stories about women's lives, stepping through two centuries, related by reappearances of the characters between them, either in person, or as influences. There’s the nurse returning to New Zealand after World War I; teenagers at a lethally souring party in the Wairarapa in the 1980s; clubbing twentysomethings in Berlin in the 90s; children on the grounds of the Karitane hospital in the early twentieth century; and Mary Wollstonecraft at sea. The stories are warm, and serious, and don't shirk any of the hard things. - Elizabeth Knox, The Post’s Best Books of 2025.

**All Her Lives impressed me as one of this year’s front runners. The stories begin in rural New Zealand at the end of the first World War, and the characters and their descendants thread their way subtly through generations in the following stories, a little in the manner of Olive Kitteridge. They are interspersed with two stories based on Mary Wollstonecraft, shadowing early feminism, the sacrifice and the grief. - Dame Fiona Kidman,The Spinoff’s Best Books of 2025

'[Horrocks has a] biographer's awareness of defining moments or meetings, of motivation and revelation, of the social forces that shape behaviour. None of Horrock's characters exist in a vacuum ... Any parent will recognise the stunning, sulking teenage girl "in the full blooming flare of a new-found fury."' —David Hill, The New Zealand Listener.

… continue[s] the inexhaustible work of exploring female power.

Of the 1981 story ‘After the Fair’: ‘Horrocks had taken me back to that time of terrible tensions in relationships when some women had to hide any embers of dissent from their partners, especially and sadly about the conflict between sport and politics. Feeling, character development and research are inextricably bound. It is a great piece.’ —Barbara Else, Newsroom

Varied in length and narrative framing, the stories of All Her Lives are classic, in a sense, each moving towards a consistent epiphany: the archetypal women of this holistic sequence jettison the notion of what constitutes their proper sphere… The greatest pleasure in Horrocks’  fiction is the way the collection’s preoccupations and characters keep surfacing, encouraging re-reading and re-evaluation of otherwise discrete pieces. She weaves them into the wide world promised by the book’s title and its insistence on women finding their own places. - Karin Warnaar, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

I’m probably the perfect audience for this book. It felt precious, to find all those unarticulated niggling feelings given to other women who also leave them unacknowledged. Glad to know it’s not just me, then. I feel among friends. - Cristina Sanders

BLURB:

What if the choices of women centuries apart could echo across time?

A sister haunted by her return from war. A young woman discovering her identity at a Berlin rave in the mid-2000s. A mother whose son’s climate activism threatens everything she’s built. At the heart of these fictional stories is Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical 18th-century feminist whose own struggles with love, loss and revolution illuminate the threads that connect all their lives.

From quiet moments of caregiving and curiosity to acts of bold rebellion, the women in this striking story collection navigate the eternal tensions between duty and desire, safety and freedom, the past they’ve inherited and the future they’re determined to create.

All Her Lives brings together extraordinary women fighting to define themselves on their own terms. At once vast and intimate.