The Bone People is a love story. It begins when a mute six-year-old, full of blasting hurt and strange charm, wanders off the beach and into the home of a despairing artist.
Kerwin has given up everything but drinking, thinking and fishing, but the arrival of the boy Simon, and later on, of his Maori foster-father Joe, drags them all into the gyre of possibilities.
Cruel, funny, ardent and beautiful, The Bone People is a powerful and visionary New Zealand fable.
Promotion info
Powerful and visionary, Keri Hulme has written the great New Zealand novel of our times.
Awards
Winner of Booker Prize for Fiction 1985.
Reviews
'In this novel, New Zealand's people, its heritage and landscape are conjured up with uncanny poetry and perceptiveness' Sunday Times
Author description
Keri Hulme has Kai Tahu, Orkney Island and English ancestry and lives on the West Coast of New Zealand. She is a writer and painter and has published short stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, and also a book of poetry.