The Bone People
Keri Hulme1984

The Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People begins in a tower on the New Zealand sea. The woman who lives there is Kerewin Holmes. Part Maori, part European, she is an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night she is disrupted by 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. 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.