The Bone People
Synopsis
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Homes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, 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 charms, 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.
Author Biography
Keri Hulme was born in March 1947 in Christchurch, New Zealand. She was a writer in residence at Otago University in New Zealand in 1978, and in 1985 at the University of Canterbury. Her first novel The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985. Hulme’s other works include The Windeater / Te Kaihu (1982), a collection of short stories, and Homeplaces (1989), her homage to three coasts of the South Island. She lives in New Zealand.
