Rebecca K. Reilly Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Rebecca K. Reilly is a published author from New Zealand. She was born on August 16, 1991 in West Auckland.

Her first novel was a best-seller in New Zealand, where it was received well and earned a lot of critical acclaim. It was the recipient of such awards as the 2019 Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing, the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards’ Hubert Church prize, and the 2022 Aotearoa Booksellers’ Choice Award. The book was also shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize in 2024.

She is the author of the book Greta & Valdin, a contemporary LGBTQ+ romance that was first published in 2021. If you are a member of the queer community or are just looking for an international best-seller to read that is worth the time, this might be a great book for you!

Rebecca attended the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington, where she graduated with her Master of Arts in creative writing. She also received the Adam Foundation Prize in creative writing in 2019 for Vines, her debut novel, which was changed to Greta & Valdin. She had been collecting material for over a dozen years and the book took a year and a half to pen.

The book was released in 2021 by Victoria University Press. The book is about the relationship that exists between two siblings, set in Auckland and contending with their own queerness. It was described as one of the funniest novels published in New Zealand in 2021 by Steve Braunias.

Rebecca K. Reilly has served as a judge as part of the Nine to Noon short story contest on Radio New Zealand along with Harry Ricketts.

Greta & Valdin is the story of a brother and a sister and follows them through the world as they attempt to deal with their multiracial identity, their queerness, and all of the dramas that happen in their entangled family that go on that are both large and small. All of this happens while they somehow make their way to love.

Main character (one of them) Valdin is doing just fine in his opinion. It’s been about a year ever since the incident, where his former boyfriend decided that he was done with the relationship and wanted to move to Buenos Aires from Auckland. Luckily, he’s recovered pretty well.

Valdin is happy with his life right now. He shares his flat with Greta, his sister. He also has a nice career and the colleagues that he works with only remind him from time to time that he is the only Maori employee there. He also prides himself on being a good friend, and knows that when he is sad he has a tendency to sleep.

Then there’s Greta, his sister and the other main character. She is someone who has never thought that she should let things like an unrequited crush let her down, so she doesn’t. She knows that her master’s thesis is quite possibly without point, as is her academic salary, which is terrible.

Greta knows that she should give herself the chance to zoom in on the grad student that she’s met at a party, who is nice and charming. She knows she should focus on the friendships that she has with the various twenty-somethings in her group who are all floundering.

However, all of the chaos from her family life at home just keeps coming and doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping soon. She knows that her mother has secrets she keeps, her nephew is in the middle of going through a crisis related to being gay, and the brother that she knows has gone to South America without saying anything.

Funny and quick, with emotional momentum that takes the story all the way to an exciting conclusion, Greta & Valdin is precisely the type of sharp-witted contemporary queer story that the fiction community needs. It also incorporates aspects of a Maori-Russian-Catalonian family and more. See why this book was a hit and a best-seller in New Zealand by picking up with affirming novel from Rebecca K. Reilly that will have you flipping through the pages until the end and warming up in the heart along the way!