It’s not an easy read content-wise either - for most of the story I was sure that this was going to be a tragedy about how three broken people try to heal each other but find that even their best efforts aren’t enough. The author also played with words and constructed impressions with carefully crafted language and I loved it, but it took attention. The Bone People took me about three times longer to read than most books this length. There is a glossary at the back of the book and many of them are guessable based on the context. Maori language is used all the time, not just words but entire phrases. No outsider friendly introductions to New Zealand and Maori culture here if you don’t get it that’s on you.

Neither the author nor the main character is at all willing to play tour guide either. And then after it’s over, you remember it as being even more amazing in hindsight, now that you’re safely home. But it did feel like an taking intimidating vacation - foreign, lovely, fascinating things all around, but always aware of the looming potential for everything to go horribly wrong. 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.

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. 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. 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.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme