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Check for Availabilityout of stock. Click on the button below to search for this title in other formats.  More copies of this ISBN:This title in other formats:The Bone Peopleby Keri Hulme
AwardsWinner of the Man Booker Prize 1985
Winner of the Pegasus Prize 1984 Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity. Review:"This startling first novel by a 38-year-old Maori woman from New Zealand has already won the New Zealand Book Award, England's Booker Prize for fiction, and Mobil Corporation's Pegasus Prize for foreign literature—plus extravagant praise from the critics. Hulme's story is simple, perhaps shockingly plain, yet almost bottomless in its emotional depth, A reclusive Maori woman (a somewhat autobiographical figure), bitter at the world yet ironically made wealthy by a lottery, has her steely exterior pierced by an orphaned, psycologically-disturbed boy who, though of normal intelligence, refuses to speak for some mysterious reason in his past. The boy's foster father, a rough-hewn Maori widower, is alternately protective and physically abusive of the boy. These three characters, and the way their love for each other develops, describe the limits of the story; but the author's concern for the characters' emotional life, as shown through the use of multiple point-of-view and stream-of-consciousness, is so obsessive in its purity that the reader doesn't miss the lack of a depiction of a real social context in this admittedly long (440 pages) novel. Where Hulme is less successful is in her attempt to use the story as a metaphor for the current fate of New Zealand and the Maori people. Maori myth, culture, and language are constant themes in The Bone People, but Hulme is done in by her success; her tale is so universal in its beauty that it passes by the uniqueness of New Zealand on its way to higher literary heights." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review) Review:"The novel is thin in narrative content but is carried strongly and steadily on the powerful current of its own vitality....It is an extraordinary book, deeply involving and unlikely to be forgotten." Choice Review:"This novel is unforgettably rich and pungent....Miss Hulme's provocative novel summons power with words, as in a conjurer's spell." The New York Times Book Review Review:"This is quite a first novel....Hulme shifts narrative points of view to build a gripping account of violence, love, death, magic, and redemption." Library Journal Review:"This book is just amazingly, wondrously great." Alice Walker Synopsis:Set in the harsh environment of the South Island beaches of New Zealand, this masterful story brings together three singular people in a trinity that reflects their country's varied heritage. Winner of the 1985 Booker-McConnell prize for fiction.
About the AuthorKeri Hulme, a Maori, grew up in Christchurch and Moeraki, New Zealand. She writes, paints, and whitebaits in Okarito, Westland. Hulme has written poems and short stories; The Bone People, originally published by Spiral, a New Zealand feminist collective, is her first novel. She has also written Te Zaihau: The Windeater. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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