num_pages: 450
description: 
  The powerful, visionary, Booker Award–winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.
“This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.” —Alice WalkerIn 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.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.
language: English
title: The Bone People
titlecomplete: The Bone People
characters: Simon Holt, Kerewin Holmes, Joe Gillayley
genres: 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Book Club, Magical Realism, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Contemporary
ratings_count: 22214
places: New Zealand
awards: awardedAt: 473414400000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 473414400000
name: Pegasus Prize for Literature, awardedAt: 441792000000
name: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
category: Fiction (NZ Book Awards)
publisher: Penguin Books