The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
A Māori artist. A mute boy. A violence that becomes a healing.
For you if
you want to understand Māori culture and spirituality through a novel that refuses every conventional literary shape
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Kerewin Holmes is a Māori artist living alone in a tower on the New Zealand coast. A mute boy named Simon wanders into her life, followed by his Māori foster father Joe. What unfolds is one of the strangest and most powerful novels in the English language — a love story, a violence story, a story about healing and land and the Māori spiritual world. Hulme wrote this over twelve years and it was rejected by every major publisher before being published by a feminist collective in 1984 and winning the Booker Prize. The most formally unusual New Zealand novel and the most important Māori literary statement.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- New Zealand
- Voice
- Written by a New Zealand author
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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