The Bone People

The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a unique novel that transports us to the heart of New Zealand's Pacific Island communities. The main character, Kerewin Holmes, is a woman in exile from her family who lives on an isolated island in New Zealand. 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—a pigeon's egg. As Holmes 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.