PRESALE - will ship March 2026

UK Edition of the acclaimed memoir first published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. This edition contains more from the voice of Lynn’s ancestor Vida, a woman whose unorthodox existence is largely erased from the family history and whose legacy the memoir sets out to explore.

Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? tells the story of poet and teacher Lynn Davidson’s late-life decision to leave Aotearoa New Zealand, with scant resources, to build a life in Scotland. In 2020, walking the Covid-emptied streets of Edinburgh, she begins her memoir.

Davidson’s look back at what made and fractured her includes an account of single-parenting in the shadow of poverty and stigma, and is interwoven with the ghostly presence of her uncontainable and courageous great aunt, and the long reach of witch hunts.

This is a love letter to the literature of Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand. It has an ear to the land and its stories. It is a celebration of choice. It is an act of resistance to the persistent idea that women are safer to stay at home.

‘I open my mouth and crows fly out.’

Praise for Chaos

‘Ostensibly about Davidson’s decision as a 50-something to leave her life in Aotearoa to build a new one in Scotland. But it also spans witches, courageous women in her family history and gives an almost rebellious respect to women who choose to live outside of expected domestic lines.’— Lyndsey Fineran, Artistic Director, Auckland Writers Festival

‘Poetic, fluid and gentle with exquisite writing about the various pulls of people and place. Underneath the beauty is a bubbling energy: Davidson’s experiences and preoccupations illuminate various misogynies, the lives of solo mothers, the lives of women, the lives of artists.’—Unity Books Bestseller Chart

‘Each word of Lynn Davidson’s prose feels perfectly weighted and earns its place.’—Ash Davida Jane, Landfall Tauraka Review