21 Feb 2021

Time to remember two traumatic Christchurch events

From Standing Room Only, 2:48 pm on 21 February 2021
Janna Ruth

Janna Ruth Photo: supplied by publisher

No caption

Photo: supplied by publisher

A frantic rewrite was required during the lockdown last year by novellist Janna Ruth, who'd set her novel Time to remember in Christchurch throughout 2020.

The book's characters are mainly preoccupied by the 10th anniversary of the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake, but Janna knew she needed to include the pandemic once it took hold.

But in fact she'd started working on the novel back in 2005, well before both traumatic events.

Janna came to New Zealand from Germany to study geology, and she uses some of her memories from her university years in Time to remember. 

In it a group of university students bond and bicker, some of them still scarred by the earthquake a decade earlier.