The Bone People
SynopsisPlot
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, 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 indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.
Story
About this book
Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a tower by the sea on the New Zealand coast. She is part Maori, part European, an artist who has stopped making art, cut off from her family and content in her isolation. That isolation ends when a mute young boy named Simon appears uninvited, first attempting to steal from her, then offering her something of deep personal value. Simon is impulsive and hard to read, and his presence pulls Kerewin into an unfamiliar kind of connection.
Simon's foster father, Joe, is Maori. He rescued the boy from a shipwreck and has raised him since, but his care is marked by a disturbing pattern of both affection and violence. The relationship between these three figures forms the novel's core, and each of them carries damage that shapes how they act toward the others. Keri Hulme uses this triangle to explore questions of language, identity, and belonging in a society where Maori and European traditions overlap and collide.
The novel is set in a rural, coastal part of New Zealand and draws on Maori cultural elements throughout its structure and language. It won the Booker Prize and the Pegasus Prize for Literature. Hulme's prose is dense with wordplay, shifting between registers and perspectives as the story moves between realism and symbolism.
