What a rollercoaster this novel is! Keri Hulme’s exceptional and iconic classic kiwi novel The Bone People, winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, is a masterful literary fiction novel which blends language, narrative structure, and style to deliver a compelling, emotional, and gut-wrenching story you will not forget.

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.
Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

I buddy read this alongside a bookstagram friend of mine and I am forever grateful for having someone to talk to about this novel because there is no way I could have truely experienced this life-changing novel on my own. The chapters are long, intense, and full of interactions, reflections, and engrossing engagement that makes it hurt to put it down. At the same time though you cannot help but want to indulge bit by bit, taking your time to truly absorb all The Bone People has to offer and let the power of the novel settle for some time between parts.

The narrative style amazed and mesmerised me from the beginning, with its subtle quirks and musical feel wrapped up in a voice that flows like water, gently brushing over page while at times also delivering the harshest of blows. It not only feels immersive, but it is a story world I felt sucked into, feeling it in such clarity and believing I was standing there in the Tower, on the beach, in the dark of night next to the characters.

I haven’t even started on the plot. It is a heartfelt and gut-wrenching story that will cleave you in two, wrapped up in witticisms and a tone that feels straight out of the Kiwi heartland. It is a slice-of-life kind of feel yet so much more, with characters so layered and authentic they feel three-dimensional on the page and secrets that will leave you breathless and reaching for the tissues. Crafted in such a stunning, haunting way, The Bone People is well-deserving of its Booker Prize title and a feat of prose perfection.

Everyone needs to pick up The Bone People. It is a New Zealand fiction novel that will rival the great classicists of the literary world, a piece of literary fiction mastery, and a glimpse into a lush, evocative, tender and frightening world. The Bone People has been a pain and a joy to read because I now feel like I have been ripped in half but sewn back together with lyricism and poetic prose that has wrapped me up in a warm blanket and nursed me back to health. The Bone People is a rough lover, but it will fill you up with warmth and oh so many thoughts you won’t be able to tear your mind from for weeks.