Dink: Diary of a Wairoa Boy - The Dink Diaries, #1

Dink: Diary of a Wairoa Boy

Book One of The Dink Diaries Trilogy

Dink Rosser has a plan.

Leave Wairoa. Move into halls. Start Health Sciences at the University of Auckland. Become a cool, independent first-year with excellent hair, excellent friends, and absolutely no emotional damage worth discussing.

Simple.

Unfortunately, Auckland has other ideas.

For the first time in his life, Dink is away from home, away from small-town gossip, and away from the people who have always known exactly who he is. Or who they think he is. Being Māori/Pākehā, gay, loud, anxious, and constantly mistaken for his polished twin brother Braden has never been simple, but university is meant to be different. Bigger. Freer. Easier to disappear into.

Then his old mate Rawiri turns up at Tennyson Brown Hall acting like he owns the city.

Rawiri has been in Auckland for a year already. He knows the shortcuts, the parties, the people, the rules. He should be the perfect guide to Dink's new life. But something about him is off. He is jumpy, evasive, always being pulled aside by people Dink does not know, and always one step away from telling the truth before laughing it off.

Dink wants to believe his mate is just popular.

He wants to believe Braden is only being difficult because that is what Braden does.

He wants to believe one bad night out is just one bad night out.

But when notes start appearing, strangers start asking questions, and Dink gets caught in a mess that was never meant for him, his fresh start begins to crack. In a city full of new faces, having the wrong one can be dangerous.

Told through Dink's chaotic, funny, and painfully honest diary voice, Dink: Diary of a Wairoa Boy is a New Adult coming-of-age novel about first-year freedom, queer survival, friendship, identity, brotherhood, and the messy search for belonging when every joke is hiding something sharper underneath.

For readers who like New Zealand campus stories, complicated twins, queer characters with bite, small-town boys in big-city trouble, and humour that keeps swinging even when the story gets dark.