Quote by Keri Hulme: “There is a stone in my heart that no water can reach.”

Some grief or pain goes so deep that nothing — no comfort, no kindness, no time — can dissolve it. It has become part of who you are, as solid and permanent as stone. This is not self-pity; it is an honest account of how deep loss can lodge itself inside a person.

The Bone People was published in 1984 after being rejected by mainstream New Zealand publishers, eventually brought out by a feminist collective. New Zealand in the early 1980s was seeing a major Māori cultural renaissance and renewed political activism around land rights and the Treaty of Waitangi.

New Zealand novelist of Māori, Scots, and English descent, best known for her debut novel The Bone People, which won the Booker Prize in 1985. Her work draws deeply on Māori spirituality, mythology, and the New Zealand landscape. She lived most of her life in Okarito on the South Island's West Coast.