Asher Emanuel was the break-out star of this weekend’s Auckland Writers Festival. He arrived as a complete nobody but after his panel appearance alongside two of the world’s best longform journalists from the New Yorker and the LA Times, everyone was talking about him and his first book The Valley quickly and completely sold out at the festival bookstall.
His book is an immersive journalism project that saw him get inside the lives of two small-time crooks and their legal aid lawyer in Wellington’s Hutt Valley. It’s a devastating portrait of the criminal justice system barely hanging on. It’s also a work of considerable artistry, a nonfiction novel in the tradition of In Cold Blood, in the way it reads like fiction with its use of dialogue and its pacing and its characters. It’s not merely the best New Zealand book of 2026; it’s a book for the ages, something extraordinary, transformative, written by a generational talent—I am pretty sure The Valley is a masterpiece.
I did not think so when I first started reading it, which is to say I flung it across the room, and howled: “Boring!” The book has a serious problem. Nothing actually happens in the lives of two small-time crooks and their legal aid lawyer in Wellington’s Hutt Valley. No one dies, no one is caught up in any kind of drama, no one goes anywhere beyond the damp riverine kingdom of the Hutt Valley. But I suspected I was being rash, and also wondered whether I felt threatened; I write about crime, High Court murders, headline cases, and here was a young guy writing about crime in an entirely different manner and approach. I picked it up again. I was soon extremely reluctant to put it down. I was swept up into its dirty realism, its quotidian detail of everyday agonies, its story of two guys who were like characters from The Grapes of Wrath or Born to Run—you want the best for them, you really feel for them, you cheer for every small victory achieved by their lawyer, but you bang your head against the pages knowing that circumstance and life at the bottom of the New Zealand ladder means they are going to commit the same stupid crimes again and again and again.
I interviewed the author by phone a couple of weeks ago. I had a bad flu and could not leave the house. We met subsequently at the Auckland Writers Festival, where I joined the crowds fawning over him and wanting a piece of the most exciting new talent in New Zealand literature. Nice guy. Tall. He wore high-waisted pants. He lives in Wellington, and works as a civil legal aid lawyer. He went to school in Auckland, attended Victoria University, and was editor of Salient. He wrote a series of unusually thoughtful series of legal stories for The Spinoff in 2019. I had never heard of him until about a month ago, when I ran into Time Out bookstore owner Jenna Todd, and she raved and raved about a new book called The Valley. It was like she had fallen madly in love. Her enthusiasm was not misplaced. I am almost speechless with admiration for his book, and felt nervous when I interviewed him.
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Your book is the result of unbelievable amounts of time and concentration. What did it do to you?
No one’s the same over eight years and it’s been a really big part of my life. I’m very pleased to have made it and to have not given up because I think it’s an important story.
Eight years, did you say?
From the very beginnings of the project and talking to the publisher about it through to being on the shelves will be all up eight years.
How old are you, Asher?
I’m 34, I think. Pretty sure. Born in ’91.
Why do you say it’s an important story?
I think what’s important about it is that most people are fortunate enough not to have interactions with the criminal justice system much more than, you know, being breathalysed, and so the picture that people get about the criminal justice system is made up of what they’re able to get through the news media and even then so often it’s covering High Court murders and the kind of things that are, in scare quotes, ‘newsworthy.’ But that’s simply not the reality of the criminal justice system for most people who have dealings with it.
I’ve got a line which I’ll be probably busting out in my various appearances coming up at Featherston and the Auckland Writers Festival to talk about my Polkinghorne book, because I think I will tell audiences about your book, and the line is that in some ways your book is kind of an antidote to Polkinghorne.
That’s really—that’s an interesting way of putting it. I see what you mean. Your book is a treatment of the trial and I think you’ve called it the trial of the century. Such an unusual case.
In contrast to what you’re doing, because what you’re covering is the absolutely usual.
Yes, exactly.
I gather that you read the book out loud to one of them.
Yeah, with Nathan. He preferred that I read it to him. With Rikkihana, I sat with him over a number of days while he read it.
You literally sat down with Nathan and read it out loud?
Yes, I would go to his place and we would drive out to the water reservoir up that way. And it was early in summer and we would sit in the car and I would read it to him for hours. It took a long time.
What stamina and what faith did this project take?
At times it has been overwhelming. When I first finished the field work, there was a good year or so where I was not doing anything really with the material. I mean, maybe it was percolating. I was thinking about it a lot but I wasn’t writing anything. And then I went about it the same way I’d done the research, which is that I would just show up over and over again, but this time it was at my desk and, you know, eventually it got done.
You showed up to write morning after morning.
Yes. Five days a week.
When’s the last time you saw Nathan and Rikihana?
I’ve been out in the last week or so dropping off copies for them and their family and friends, and other people connected to the book. So I’ve been able to see one of them. The other one I haven’t been able to track down, but he is around, I’m told, and was seen not that long ago. And the book is waiting for him at a place that he goes to frequently. So hopefully it will be in his hands soon.
That’s an interesting vagueness.
I’m just a bit cautious.
With all due caution, what are their two circumstances, Asher?
It’s similar to what was going on when I was doing the fieldwork. But I think in some ways there’s been some improvements for one of them.
Their situation felt hopeless to me.
People change, and sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. That’s true of all of us. And you never know when someone’s life might turn a corner.
At the district court level that you are writing this book and the people who you’re writing about, is the system broken?
What’s broken is the broader system of care for people who are experiencing some kind of crisis or social dysfunction. I think that there are these parts of the criminal justice system or parts of the care system alongside the courts that most people don’t have any experience of, and no one’s really aware outside of those who work in the system or have to rely on these services, of exactly how run-down they are. And I think a lot of people will be shocked.
What do you want changed? This book is a sort of a demand for change, isn’t it?
I don’t know if books can do that. There was a period where I became quite depressed, angry and cynical about the book, and was upset by my suspicions that what I was doing was just a different kind of content. That was a bit of a low period and I think I’ve moderated my views a little bit. You know, I have followed through and put book out. So for me, the book is clarifying about what the problem is. And I hope that for readers it will also be clarifying.
Would you like for people who actually make decisions about these things to read the book and to be clarified?
Yes, certainly. I wonder who you mean by that?
Well, it’s hard to imagine police minister Mark Mitchell sitting down and reading the book and being clarified, but that might be a great objective.
I do wonder sometimes how aware even people in positions of political authority are of what it’s like at the pointy end of the stick.
You write about the relationship between the way crime reporting influences the politics of criminal justice. All the stories a few years back on ramraids, for instance.
Yes. That was the background to political changes as we’ve moved from a criminal justice system that surely was not perfect, but had far, far fewer people in prison. And those who were in prison, it’s my impression they had better support as compared to what it’s like now.
Where are you, by the way?
I’ve been given access to a flat in One Tree Hill to have a quiet place to speak.
You’re from Auckland, right?
I grew up here but I’ve been living in Wellington for more than 15 years now.
I think you grew up in Westmere and went to school at St Kentigern.
[Pause] Yeah.
You got the only 100% mark in Year 13 for English in your year. Well done.
Thanks, Steve. I went to Bayfield Primary and then Ponsonby Intermediate, and then I went to St Kent’s on a scholarship.
You refer to Andrew Little in the book when he was the Minister of Justice and did things like getting rid of the stupid Three Strikes law. You spoke with Little around about that time. Did you have a sense that good things were happening?
I think back then there was this acceptance that there were too many people in prison. Various steps were taken to try to resolve that, but just getting people out of custody doesn’t solve the problems that people are facing. Their lives are in such a state that they’re finding themselves caught up in the criminal justice system. This book is set during that period. Housing is still the biggest problem, and mental health and education, and some of it’s just practical, you know, they don’t have the kind of practical support that people do who are in families which have some stability, and they can get support from their family or friends if they’re in crisis.
What does Asher Emanuel think of boot camps?
I don’t have very strong views. Let me think a moment, Steve. [pause] I think that looking at the stories of Nathan and Rikihana, their early placement in prison in their teenage years had really big and negative effects on them. And I think wherever possible, not placing young people into those sort of institutional settings, you know, is preferable. But my research and knowledge is pretty thin on youth justice topics.
What do you think Nathan and Rikihana made of you?
I don’t really know.
They got used to you, obviously.
Yeah, I think we all got on.
You write about driving one of them somewhere and you learned subsequently that it was some kind of drug deal.
Yeah. It wasn’t until quite a bit a few months later that I found out that that was his connection to that address. I’m not sure exactly what drug he had that day. The book discusses that he has ongoing issues with opioid addiction.
Capote’s In Cold Blood deals with the appalling murders of a family of five. That’s his material, that’s his subject. Your subject, in your own attempt at a nonfiction novel, is two guys who steal shit. As a writer, your challenge is to make that uninteresting subject interesting. Was that something that you struggled with?
Well, I feel that people are interesting and if you spend enough time with most people, there will be something that is of real interest and something that’s special and surprising about them. And I think that turned out to be the case with these three people.
As well as the lesser characters, like the red-haired police prosecutor.
Sergeant Kelly.
He seemed a petty and almost vindictive guy.
I don’t think that’s how I see it. I thought the relationship between him and Lewis as a defence lawyer was very illustrative of the experience of people working in the system. They both feel very strongly that they are in the right and that they’re doing the right thing. Kelly knows this stuff with Nathan and Rikihana has been going on for years, and you can sense his frustration and the way in which it can bubble over.
It’s a story that won’t be unfamiliar to people within the courts, this sense of defence lawyers being up against it resource-wise, and that it’s frustrating also for police and prosecution and all these parts of these public services where, you know, the lights are still on because the people who are doing the jobs just do it, you know, even though more and more has been tried to be wrung out of them in the system for less and less for so long that there’s just not enough often to do the job to the level that people would want to do it. But they try.
Are you in that position now? Are you trying?
I practice mainly civil legal aid work. So most of my work at the moment would be representing people who have issues to do with their treatment in custody.
How would you describe that work?
Well, there’s plenty of it, which is not good and I think it’s reflective of the fact that it’s a system in a state of crisis and people are not being treated right.
What are the things which need to be done and can they be done?
Support should be necessary for people in circumstances like those that Nathan and Rikkihana find themselves in. They need support so they have a chance at overcoming their various and compounding difficulties. It’s really expensive and it’s not always successful and sometimes it requires multiple goes. It might be a bit boring because it’s not a quick fix or a new policy idea. It’s that old fundamental political problem of who gets what. And I don’t think that the solutions to who gets what are actually all that complicated or unknown, but they are politically difficult. And so maybe people are in search of shortcuts or ways around that. The disappointing news is there is no quick fix or shortcut.
How do these legal aid lawyers in the district courts get up in the mornings and do it all over again? Day after day, surviving on bad coffee and being in these horrible courtrooms with their recidivist clients—how do they do it?
I don’t know. You will have known some of them, Steve.
Not really. I’m much more a creature of the High Court.
You know, the thing I take away from my work on this book is just how much we—I mean the defence lawyers and the police and the defendants and their families—are at the whim of these sort of greater historical changes and forces. But I think that Lewis and his colleagues have a sense of satisfaction for being able to do for their clients, despite it all. There are always people who like to be in these kind of roles of providing assistance to other people.
ReadingRoom is devoting all week to coverage of The Valley. Tuesday: the opening chapter. Tomorrow: a long review by writer and criminal lawyer Fergus Porteous.
