Once Were Warriors
by Alan Duff
Urban Māori. A violent husband. A mother who finally says enough.
For you if
you want to understand what dispossession looks like two generations on — when the land is gone and the culture is gone and what's left is a housing estate
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Beth Heke lives in a state housing estate in Auckland with her husband Jake — a man of enormous physical presence and charm who cannot hold a job and cannot stop drinking and cannot stop hitting her. Duff writes about urban Māori poverty with a directness that made New Zealand deeply uncomfortable when the novel was published in 1990. The most uncomfortable New Zealand novel on this shelf and the most necessary — the dispatch from inside the experience of a people dispossessed of their land and culture and trying to survive in a welfare estate with none of the tools that survival requires.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- New Zealand
- Voice
- Written by a New Zealand author
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