The Bone People.

Keri Hulme — 1986

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.

Reviews

Marie@adastra

Jan 2, 2024

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@blueskygreenstrees

Dec 25, 2023

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@davegiraffe

Nov 18, 2022

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@cams

Jul 31, 2022

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.