Six Miles to Whatawhata

By: Flybury, David

SIX MILES TO WHATAWHATA begins as a witty, sharply observed travel narrative, but soon reveals itself to be a far more intimate and surprising novel. What looks at first like the story of two eccentric British travellers wandering through Southeast Asia and New Zealand becomes a moving portrait of a marriage, a family and the private landscapes we all carry with us. David Flybury blends travelogue, domestic drama, grief story, comedy of manners, philosophical reflection into a single, compelling voice held together by humour, tenderness and a precise understanding of human contradiction.
Ellie and Isaac, long married, embark on a pre-retirement journey that is at once chaotic, joyful and quietly fraught. Their scenes are filled with comic bickering about socks, flies, supermarkets and the inconveniences of tourism, offset by lush descriptions of New Zealand's overwhelming natural beauty. The rhythm of their partnership-its comfort, irritation, warmth and long-developed choreography-is captured with such accuracy that the reader feels like a companion on the trip.
Yet the journey is only the surface. Ellie's fierce, compulsive writing becomes the emotional core of the book. She writes to hold on to memory, to keep silence at bay, to locate herself in the world. Isaac's repeated question-"Who are you writing this for?"-echoes the novel's deeper preoccupation with how we narrate our own lives, and what happens when the audience we imagine is not the one we ultimately reach.
The novel's emotional centre shifts with their daughter, Jennifer, whose narrative unfolds years later in North London. Grieving her father and newly out of a failed relationship, she finds herself paralysed by stillness and memory. Jennifer's chapters are inward where her parents' are outward, quiet where theirs are expansive. Flybury renders the texture of depression and unresolved grief with remarkable subtlety: never melodramatic, never clinical, always precise. Her stagnation becomes as vivid and gripping as her parents' roaming.
This interplay-movement versus paralysis, exuberant outward gaze versus claustrophobic interiority-gives the novel its emotional architecture. As the introduction wryly notes, SIX MILES TO WHATAWHATA is "a gay novel about straight people" the observational humour, the emotional intelligence and the rhythms of the prose are distinctly queer, while the characters themselves are an ordinary family whose disappointments, miscommunications and stubborn love feel universal.
The travel writing is one of the book's great pleasures. Flybury evokes the mountains, lakes, forests and skies of New Zealand with a mix of lyric beauty and comic disbelief, often undercutting the sublime with the petty irritations of global tourism. Yet the landscape is never merely scenic. It is haunted by environmental loss, colonial history and the fragility of memory. The natural world becomes a mirror for Ellie's fear of forgetting, Isaac's awareness of ageing and Jennifer's sense of being left behind.
Jennifer's storyline reframes everything that precedes it. What once appeared to be affectionate comedy becomes a prelude; her memories illuminate gaps in her parents' narratives and reveal the emotional inheritances passed down through families-love, silence, ambition and disappointment-whether intended or not.
What ultimately makes SIX MILES TO WHATAWHATA so affecting is its deep belief in the value of ordinary lives. Ellie, Isaac and Jennifer are not extraordinary people, yet through Flybury's generous, intelligent, beautifully strange storytelling, their small moments become luminous. The novel suggests that meaning is found not in the spectacular but in the everyday: in the way a partner jokes, the ache of a daughter's memory, the light on a lake at the end of a long day.
A novel about witnessing-other people, the world, and ourselves-SIX MILES TO WHATAWHATA is warm, funny, humane and quietly triumpha...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G4JRDYVM
• ISBN13: 9798276563329
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"