Keri Hulme has Kai Tahu, Orkney Island and English ancestry and lives at Okarito on the West Coast of New Zealand. She is writer and painter and has published short stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, and also a book of poetry.

“The Bone People” is a love story. It begins when a mute six-year-old, full of blasting hurt and strange charm, wanders off the beach and into the home of a despairing artist. Kerwin has given up everything but drinking, thinking and fishing, but the arrival of the boy Simon, and later on, of his Maori foster-father Joe, drags them all into the gyre of possibilities. Cruel, funny, ardent and beautiful, “The Bone People” is a powerful and visionary New Zealand fable.