It was some time on Saturday night after work but before closing time at the pub that Delia Chapman saw a spaceman. Well, that wasn't quite true. She saw ten of them. They stayed for about half an hour. And they took her on their 'vessel.' They had silver suits and stainless-steel boots.
So begins Anthony's savagely funny first novel. Opunake, the small New Zealand town whose most controversal issue is a recently installed speed camera,
is shaken twice in one day: first an alien sighting, then the appearance of an attractive young man called Philip who turns up to rejuvenate the crumbling library and his crumbling career. The rumour mill starts spinning when Delia, sixteen years old and a virgin,
discovers she is pregnant; a cow is found flattened and signed in the middle of a corn circle, and suddenly two other factory girls think they are suffering from alien pregnancies too. The gossip is flying circles around the town, and somehow Philip is caught in the loop....
