Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is quite a first novel. The ending is revealed at its mysterious beginning; exotic line breaks and poetic punctuation put off at first but gradually become the best way to tell the tale; the Maori vocabulary is interwoven with contemporary British, Australian, and American idioms; and the New Zealand sea- and landscape vibrate under fresh perception. Hulme shifts narrative points of view to build a gripping account of violence, love, death, magic, and redemption. A silverhaired, mute, abused orphan, a laborer heavy with sustained loss, and a brilliant intro spective recluse discover, after enormous struggle through injury and illness, what it means to lose and then regain a family. No wonder The Bone People won the Pegasus Prize. Highly recommended. Rhoda Yerburgh, Adult Degree Program, Vermont Coll., Montpelier (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Hulme's novel tells the story of three people in rural New Zealand: Kerewin, a part-Maori woman; Joe, a Maori man; and Simon, a Pakeha (European) child whom Joe finds washed up on the shore during a storm. Joe alternately loves the child passionately and thrashes him brutally. Although they are ``different and difficult people,'' isolated from those around them, they are drawn into a intense relationship. After a time, however, the problems that had been submerged resurface and the three are torn apart into separateness, each going into a dark night and approaching death itself before being wonderfully healed in body and in soul-the two adults by Maori healers, the child by European doctors. The novel ends on an upwelling of optimism as the three, now integrated into the society around them, embrace their destiny together. The novel is thin in narrative content but is carried strongly and steadily on the powerful current of its own vitality, which does not weaken even in the scenes of heavy beer drinking and abrasive encounters. It is an extraordinary book, deeply involving and unlikely to be forgotten. It was selected for Mobil's Pegasus Prize for Foreign Literatures in English, and is likely to receive other awards. Strongly recommended for all libraries.-J.B. Beston, Nazareth College of Rochester

Kirkus Book Review

Kerewin Holmes is a female (but quite unsexed) New Zealand hermit painter (she made what she needs to live by winning the lottery) whose self-sufficient, vaguely mystical rhythms of life are broken into when she discovers a small boy, Simon, on the beach near her hut, apparently having survived a shipwreck. After nursing him back to health, Kerewin eventually relinguishes Simon (who seems like he can't--and certainly won't--speak) over to a foster father, a Maori man named Joe Gillayley; and though Joe loves Simon fiercely, he doesn't react well to Simon's frequently contrary and maddening behaviors--reactions which too often end up in brutal beatings (one is even nearly fatal). Kerewin tries to step in, threading the needle between her real affections for Simon and Joe both--a situation that novelist Hulme tries unsuccessfully to stretch over the length of nearly 500 pages, hoping it will become a plot. It never happens. Stylistically, it's a very homemade-feeling book, hippy-ish, filled with elaborate Maori references (a glossary in back is indispensable, too indispensable), inner thoughts, goopy lyricism, and torrents of inner thinking that are clumsy and unconvincing. In all, a slow slog through a good deal of self-congratulatory spiritual homeopathy, with only the smallest smidge of story thrown in. The book is the winner of this year's (Mobil Oil-sponsored) Pegasus Prize for Literature. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Keri Hulme had been writing for several years, little known outside New Zealand feminist and Maori literary circles. Then, during the mid-1980s, she gained international attention for her novel The Bone People. In 1984 she received the Mobil Pegasus Award for Maori Writers and the New Zealand Book of the Year Award for fiction, and, in the following year, the distinguished Booker-McConnel Prize, Britain's highest literary honor.

Hulme, who was born in Christchurch, is of Maori descent on her mother's side; her father was an Englishman from Lancashire. Studying for a law degree but not completing it, she worked at various jobs before settling down to write full time.

The Bone People (1984) remains Hulme's major work. Almost impossible to describe in a coherent way, the novel is a sprawling and puzzling story about a relationship between a strange child, a powerful woman named Kerewin who reluctantly takes him in, and the child's father, who treats him brutally. According to the critic Margery Fee, the implausible yet metaphoric and sophisticated structure of the text sets out "to rework the old stories that govern the way New Zealanders---both Maori (indigenous New Zealanders) and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European origin)---think about their country."

Hulme has also published two books of short stories about Maori life, Lost Possessions (1985) and Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986); the short fiction, too, incorporates the intentionally chaotic and often bombastic style that dominates The Bone People. She has written two volumes of free verse as well, The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (1982) and Strands (1992).

Hulme has received extensive attention from international critics who see her, as Margery Fee says, in the forefront of the "postcolonial discursive formation evolving worldwide"---that is, writers who have set out to reinvent the history of imperialism.

(Bowker Author Biography)