The Bone People - Softcover

Hulme, Keri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330485415 ISBN 13: 9780330485418

Publisher: Picador USA, 2001

Synopsis

Powerful and visionary, Keri Hulme has written the great New Zealand novel of our times. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, The Bone People is the story of Kerewin, a despairing part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way to face the world. Her cocoon is rudely blown away by the sudden arrival during a rainstorm of Simon, a mute six-year-old whose past seems to hold some terrible trauma. In his wake comes his foster-father Joe, a Maori factory worker with a nasty temper. The narrative unravels to reveal the truths that lie behind these three characters, and in so doing displays itself as a huge, ambitious work that tackles the clash between Maori and European characters in beautiful prose of a heartrending poignancy. 'In this novel, New Zealand's people, its heritage and landscape are conjured up with uncanny poetry and perceptiveness' Sunday Times

About this title

About the Author:

Keri Hulme has Kai Tahu, Orkney Island and English ancestry and lives on the West Coast, South Island, Aotearoa â New Zealand. She is a writer and painter, author books including short stories, poetry and essays â and a libretto. Her first novel The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330485415
• ISBN 13: 9780330485418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300