The Bone People - Softcover

Hulme, Keri

4.04

22,561 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330296108 ISBN 13: 9780330296106

Publisher: Picador, 1986

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Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment. Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

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About the Author:

Keri Hulme is of Maori, Scottish, and English ancestry and grew up in Christchurch and Moeraki, New Zealand. She has worked as a fish-'n'-chip cook, tobacco picker, woolen mill winder, census taker, journalist, postmistress, and television director. In 1983 she became a full-time writer. Through a government lottery, she won a plot of land on a remote Westland coast, where she erected an octagonal-shaped dwelling and settled in. She writes, paints, and fishes and has published seven books.

From Library Journal:

This is quite a first novel. The ending is revealed at its mysterious beginning; exotic line breaks and poetic punctuation put off at first but gradually become the best way to tell the tale; the Maori vocabulary is interwoven with contemporary British, Australian, and American idioms; and the New Zealand sea- and landscape vibrate under fresh perception. Hulme shifts narrative points of view to build a gripping account of violence, love, death, magic, and redemption. A silverhaired, mute, abused orphan, a laborer heavy with sustained loss, and a brilliant intro spective recluse discover, after enormous struggle through injury and illness, what it means to lose and then regain a family. No wonder The Bone People won the Pegasus Prize. Highly recommended. Rhoda Yerburgh, Adult Degree Program, Vermont Coll., Montpelier
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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