Good Things Come and Go | Josie Shapiro

The stunning second novel from the bestselling author of Everything Is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. After the death of their young daughter, Penny Whittaker and Adam Riggs are struggling. Penny's lifelong dream of becoming a successful artist has stalled, and Riggs, battling an addiction to prescription painkillers, is coming to grips with the end of his glittering professional skateboarding career.  When Penny is unexpectedly offered a chance to exhibit her work at an Auckland gallery, she accepts, despite her reservations. At the same time, back in Auckland, Jamie Flannery suddenly finds himself out of work and out of options. To recuperate, he moves to his uncle's abandoned bach on the Coromandel, and when his childhood friend Riggs calls out the blue, the three friends reunite. At first, being together feels just like old times. But secrets from their shared past threaten their newfound peace, forcing them to reckon with their history and themselves. A novel about friendship and betrayal, ambition and grief, Good Things Come and Go is also a study of homecoming and heartbreak and an ode to the courage of taking risks no matter the consequences.

'With an expert eye for light and shadow, Shapiro traces the contours of sorrow, regret, and the luminous moments of bliss we hold close. Poignant, redemptive, electrifying.' - Catherine Chidgey 'A tender, tough story of loss and renewal, love and rage, the promise of youth and the aching regrets of middle age, Josie Shapiro's Good Things Come and Go pays careful attention to lives that on the surface look broken at worst, at best, ordinary enough. The reward is a powerful reminder that inside every one of us is a dream worth chasing, no matter how much time or talent has been laid to waste. Josie writes with a fluent, dry-eyed empathy about the kind of losses that are blazed on a heart forever in this story about grief, love, friendship and the operation of an extraordinary, everyday kind of grace. The writing is carefully understated, at times brilliantly, blazingly physical: I love reading Josie Shapiro describing bodies in motion, bodies at rest, bodies that hurt.' - Noelle McCarthy

Josie Shapiro is the bestselling author of Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, which won the inaugural Allen & Unwin Fiction prize and was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Spinoff and the New Zealand Listener. A graduate of the University of Auckland's Master of Creative Writing, Josie was a Sargeson Fellow in 2024 and was named one of the 2025 New Voices of Aotearoa. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her husband and two daughters.