Summary | Author | Reviews | Discussion Questions


The Bone People
Keri Hulme, 1985
464 pp.

In Brief
Winner of the Man Booker Award.

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.
Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand as it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world. (From the publisher)

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About the Author

• Birth—March 9, 1947
• Where—Christchurch, New Zealand
• Education—studied law at the University of Canterbury
• Awards—Man Booker Award, 1985
• Currently—lives in Okarito, Westland, New Zealand


Keri Hulme, a Maori, grew up in Christchurch and Moeraki, New Zealand. She writes, paints, and whitebaits in Okarito, Westland. Hulme has written poems and short stories; The Bone People, her first novel, won the prestigious Man Booker Award for fiction. She has also written Te Zaihau: The Windeater.

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Critics Say. . .
This a powerful, gripping book, with sharply drawn characters who tug at every heartstring. But I need to insert a disclaimer here: it’s not an easy book, and it's not for everyone. Hulme’s long-windedness, her strange flights of prose or poetry, can feel excessive at times. There is also a violent episode that is particularly disturbing, although it's critical to the plot. Thankfully, the characters achieve.... Read more.
A LitLovers LitPick - Jun. 07


Winner of the 1985 Booker Prize, this novel by a New Zealander of Maori, Scottish and English ancestry focuses on three peopleone Maori, one European and one of mixed bloodwho are locked together in animosity and love. Although Hulme sometimes is sidetracked into self-indulgent verbiage, she has abundant, enticing stories to tell of culturally split lives.
Publishers Weekly


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.
Library Journal



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