Dominic Hoey's Poor People with Money is a guide to life in NZ in the 21st century

Dominic Hoey confronts social truths in his new book.

Dominic Hoey's second novel, Poor People with Money, is a GPS guide for the collective experience of life in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 21st century. It is populated with somehow very familiar people in completely recognisable places, pushed by circumstances and economics into choices that may not always be the wisest – or the safest. Hoey delivers nail-biting suspense, punctuated with laugh-out-loud moments, while confronting some very necessary social truths.

"I think it is really important to anchor any piece of writing," says Hoey, "and the best way to anchor it is to give it a really strong setting. I guess the book is also trying to tell stories of Aotearoa and Tāmaki Makaurau, and people and places that maybe aren't being told."

In a time when many of our novelists are products of masters courses, Hoey delivers something different. He has been a MC battle- and slam-poetry champion, a successful rapper with five albums (including a stand-out track, John Key's Son is a DJ), a playwright, and he teaches writing to rangatahi. He once took up a writer's residency in Iceland.

"I have always been interested in words and I have always really wanted to use them but I didn't learn to read until I was about 9," he explains. "I can't spell and my handwriting is completely illegible, so my relationship with words has been fraught. I think that means now that I can write and have a good control of words, I really appreciate them … I love words."

But with skill, comes obligations.

"I think that artists, especially when you have a bit of a profile, have a responsibility to be politically engaged, giving a voice to communities and situations where people don't get heard. A while ago I thought, 'Why am I so bored with the majority of this s*** that comes out?' and I realised that it is university-educated people from the central city who have money and have always had money and it is them talking about their problems.

"Kei te pai that they get to make those books or TV shows or whatever, but I personally am not interested in it … I guess I realised that when poor people are represented, they are like cartoons or redemption stories. It is never like when you are broke, your life is just as rich and beautiful and complex as the life of a rich person, if not more so."

In Poor People with Money, Monday Woolridge lives with her reclusive flatmate, JJ, in a barely furnished apartment in Avondale. Her past has been fractured into the jagged fragments of some long-gone New Zealand dream. Working as a bartender in Beerville in Kingsland, Monday also trains as a kickboxer, while occasionally sleeping with Grant, ("good-looking in a boring sort of way"), who is a casual cocaine-dealer with "No Regrets" tattooed across his chest in an Olde English font.

"A lot of this book revolves around kickboxing," says Hoey. "I used to train in kickboxing at a very, very amateur level in my 20s and early 30s. I used to enjoy combat sports. I have always been on the periphery of that world. And then I came up with the main character, Monday, and I just loved writing in her voice and all of that came together over a couple of years."

Monday's trainer, Shaun, wants her to enter a kickboxing competition in Thailand. It requires focus, dedication and money. She wins a fight in Auckland and picks up the cash prize pot. She also needs to pay her rent and her mother's expenses in care. But a night out, copious alcohol, a bad decision and Grant's coke sees the money disappear.

"Thematically, it is about how trauma affects people differently," comments Hoey. "All the characters are living with different types of trauma, manifesting it in completely different ways and with all the things you have to do when you are poor, when you are living in poverty, to get money.

"I think a lot of people who grew up in middle class or upper class don't understand that and how you end up putting yourself in danger to basically get yourself some dignity, or in these characters' cases, one wants to travel, one wants to support their family…"

In the contemporary world, the internet answers every problem. Sitting in his darkened room, JJ has learned certain skills including the ability to find cocaine on the Dark Web. An order is placed and surprisingly the package arrives intact. Monday and JJ are suddenly cashed-up. More packages are ordered. There is shopping at St Luke's – sunglasses over bloodshot eyes – and more friends than ever.

But there are also the Hastings brothers – Romeo, with his miniature fluffy dog, and Sylvester – along with their sister, Frank. If there is business to be done, it is their business, and it comes with menaces. Another bad decision sees Monday and JJ flee to a tiny settlement in Northland with a backpack of cash.

The "village-so-small-it-is-not-on-most-maps" is illustrated on the book's inside-cover in a deceptively A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh style. This place is no childhood paradise. Monday and JJ find condemned houses, dope-growing, and the remnants of a hippie commune who might be methamphetamine dealers now, who everyone calls the Vampires as they move around the rural night in vehicle convoys. This is not the 100% Pure New Zealand that anyone would promote.

"I'm in a relationship with someone in the States and she came here for the first time and was talking about how this place was a lot darker than it is advertised overseas. They just get Lord of the Rings and Jacinda, but there is also the youth suicide rate, the mental health crisis, the treatment of indigenous and Pasifika people and all these things, which is very shameful, and it is all there … Look at all the best New Zealand art – it is as dark as f***."

Poor People with Money, however, is also often extremely funny.

"If you make people laugh," Hoey comments, "people will come along with you through so much. There are definitely heavy parts in the novel and I have done plays before dealing with quite heavy subject matter but I have found if you can make the audience laugh they will kind of go anywhere with you."

Poor People With Money, by Dominic Hoey.

Poor People with Money, by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, $37), is available on August 9.