Latest Release: Empathy

Mākaro Press
ISBN: 9781067011314
September 2025

Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he’s developing – sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once Alison’s fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim’s game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder.

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“Bryan Walpert’s storytelling has a rare and slow-moving intensity that doesn’t miss a beat. It is fiction of the highest order and Empathy is a novel for our times.”
-Lloyd Jones

“This is a superbly plotted thriller of forbearance and empathy, both the words and the chemicals behind the concepts. Unusual, edgy, and very, very good.”
– Cristina Sanders

“The book has all the elements you expect in a crime thriller, from small-time crooks to corporate secrets, intrigue, drama and violence. The carefully constructed plot is pulled skintight by a highly skilled writer who knows exactly how to treat the reader to a fun ride. Yet, Walpert has also done something different here, taking us on a highly entertaining and perceptive deep dive into the nature of love and human connection. Empathy is a superb thriller from one of our best.”
-Anna Scaife, Kete Books (full review here)

“Empathy is mostly a slow, interior-driven novel filled with lush and clever passages. These quieter sections, however, alternate with faster-paced scenes that create an addictive edge to an otherwise literary novel. The stakes seem quite low until, suddenly, they are so high and grotesque that one might gasp and put the book down in shock.”
-Josie Shapiro, The Listener (full review here)

“A cracker of a novel…a really intelligent thriller. It’s got that slow burn intensity that only a very good writer can pull off.”
-Stella Chrysostomou, RNZ Nine to Noon (full review here)

“What makes this novel really sophisticated is Walpert’s being able to present what could be called a thriller, but he has the nous to also deal with real issues…Certainly a book for grown-ups.”
-Nicholas Reid, Reid’s Reader (full review here)

“You may be wondering how a novel predicated on perfume, gaming and empathy becomes a thriller in the first place, but that would make you much naiver than Walpert ever is in a novel that fully comprehends the potentially bad as well as good consequences of an apparently benign quality. Just as you can have too much of a good thing, you can have too much of goodness. Empathy the novel, however, gets it just right.”
– Guy Somerset, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books (full review here)

“a thrilling, deeply emotional read that will keep you hooked until the very last page.”
– Jamie Trower, M2 Magazine