Bone People - Hardcover

Hulme, Keri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340370246 ISBN 13: 9780340370247

Publisher: Spiral Pr, 1983

Synopsis

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Spiral Pr
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0340370246
• ISBN 13: 9780340370247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 450