In celebration of our anniversary, a selection of Penguin’s most distinctive contemporary books now features covers specially designed by the world’s top illustrative artists. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.įor seventy-five years, Penguin has paired the best in literature with the best in graphic design. Keri Hulme, the New Zealander whose 1984 novel the bone people won the Man Booker Prize, has died. 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. 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. 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. 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.

“This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.” -Alice Walker Almost impossible to describe in a coherent way, the novel is a sprawling and puzzling story about a relationship between a strange child, a powerful woman named Kerewin who reluctantly takes him in, and the childs father, who treats him brutally. The powerful, visionary, Booker Award–winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage The Bone People (1984) remains Hulmes major work.

Author of the bone people