Keri Hulme

At once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, Booker Prize-winning novel "The Bone People" is a powerful and unsettling tale saturated with violence and Maori spirituality.

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.

The Bone People.

Marie

The Bone People is a challenging book to read due to it's eclectic writing style. It breaks a lot of conventions and utilizes a variety of ways to let us see into the characters—though it's not always quite clear which character, or what is really happening, and certainly not why. The book probably needs re-reading a few times to truly be appreciated/analyzed. 

At the core of it, however, is the strange relationship between a hermit painter who lives in her self-built tower, a very clever though mute child, and the child's foster father who can be very affectionate, but also very violent. The book has a few parts that are a bit tedious, but also quite a lot that are moving, shocking and suspenseful. It's certainly unlike anything I've ever read before.

Laura Mauler

I have too many thoughts and feelings about this book to do it any justice. There is beauty and there is suffering. Sometimes I had to take breaks because it was so beautiful it hurt, sometimes I took breaks because there was simply too much hurting.

On a personal note, Kerewin reminded me very strongly of someone I used to know, someone who meant the world to me a lifetime ago. Everything that was art and knowledge and music and wordplay conjured this ghost out of my past. Bittersweet.

Evil Lizzard

This is my favourite novel of all time. It is disturbing and magical and beautiful and made of pure brilliance. I can't recommend this book enough. I would order you to read it, because it is good for your soul, but I will be polite and ask you to kindly consider it. It's so worth it.

Cams Campbell

One of my favourite books. Recommended by a special friend during a difficult year and read at a difficult time. It so helped me through that. It's a very spiritual book in the sense that it goes deep into the mechanics of relationships and pain. It moved me to my core.

UPDATE 23 October 2018
I just had this flagged up on this day in history and I really have the urge to read it again. I've just bumped it up to five stars because this book has stayed in my memory over all these years - first read it in 1995.

Francine Corry

Dorothea

Kaycee

Catrin Ashton

Tyler Freitas

Kathy Rodger 

Campbell Thompson

Jane McCullough

Jordan Carr

Melody Izard

Deborah Meades

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Kim Arychuk

Rachel Rozdzial

Abby N. Lewis

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment. Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

The Bone People

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