DICE

Set in Rotorua, New Zealand, Dice is a courtroom drama told from the perspective of a diverse group of ordinary people - the jury.

Four young men in their late teens have been charged with multiple sexual offences against three girls as a result of a sex game they invented based on rolling a dice. The jury must consider contentious issues of consent, date-rape, social media misuse and intoxication. How will this group of men and women from eighteen to seventy-two, white and Maori, a dishwasher and a scientist, a forester, a childcare worker and an accountant, work out what actually happened and who should be punished? And how will the power dynamics in the jury room affect this? From pre-trial to post-trial, each juror narrates a chapter of the novel through which we see the impact of the jurors' life experiences and values on their narrative construction of the evidence, as well as the impact of the trial on their own personal lives. The reader, too, is invited to participate as a jury member with the structure of the novel mirroring aspects of the court experience as information is withheld, fragmented and re-told by different witnesses. As Catherine Chidgey, award-winning novelist, writes: 'the novel achieves what the best fiction achieves: it draws us into the story on a deeply personal level, coaxing us to consider what we would do in the same situation.' In the context of the current debate in many countries about the effectiveness of jury trials in providing justice for victims of sexual offences, and the on-going 'MeToo' movement, Dice is an incredibly timely exploration of how sexual violence is viewed in our society. In drawing on 'ground-breaking' doctorate jury research which analyses the influence of rape myths on real jurors' narratives in sexual violence trials, the novel is 'an utterly compelling, nuanced and appropriately complex read.' (Professor Vanessa Munro, Warwick University, UK world-leading jury researcher). Claire Baylis was born in England and emigrated to New Zealand at sixteen. Her fiction has appeared in various New Zealand publications and has been read on Radio New Zealand. Dice is her first novel. It was written as part of a PhD in creative writing. Claire studied law and then lectured in it for twelve years at Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka before moving to Rotorua with her family. There she wrote, brought up her three children, worked as an interviewer and researcher for the Trans-Tasman Jury Study and set up a water safety programme targeting low-decile schools.