Every two months, The Book Fairies choose a new territory from which to find a great book. This time, the title chosen is The Bone People by New Zealander Keri Hulme. Join us on Goodreads to read along with us!
About Keri Hulme:
Keri Hulme is a New Zealand novelist, poet, and short-story writer. Her novel, The Bone People, won the Man Booker Prize in 1985. She was the first New Zealander to win this award. Hulme’s writing explores themes of isolation, postcolonial and multicultural identity, and Maori, Celtic, and Norse mythology.
About The Bone People:
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.