Cousins
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  • Published: 25 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780143776598
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House New Zealand Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 58 min

Cousins

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Mar 2021
EBook
1 Aug 2013
Audiobook
25 Feb 2022
Paperback
5 Aug 1992
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One of Patricia Grace's most popular novels.

Now a feature film, this is the unforgettable story of three women's intersecting lives.

Makareta is the chosen one — carrying her family's hopes.
Missy is the observer — the one who accepts but has her dreams.
Mata is always waiting — for life to happen as it stealthily passes by.

Moving from the forties to the present, from the country to the protests of the cities, Cousins is the story of these three cousins. Thrown together as children, they have subsequently grown apart, yet they share a connection that can never be broken.

A stunning novel about tradition and change, about whanau and its struggle to survive, about the place of women in a shifting world.

‘. . . it is robust and powerful. I simply could not put it down. Lyrical and vibrant, smoothly paced and quietly rhythmic, Grace's language moves easily from one person to the next, as the stories unfold.’ — Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, NZ Listener

‘Cousins is an engrossing story that runs on in the head long after it has finished.’ — Dominion Sunday Times

‘Patricia Grace writes with an enviable clarity and power.’ — Evening Post
Cousins has been adapted for the screen, the film produced by Miss Conception Films and Whenua Films, directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, screenplay by Briar Grace-Smith and Patricia Grace.
  • Published: 25 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780143776598
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House New Zealand Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 58 min
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About the author

Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand’s most prominent and celebrated Maori fiction authors and a figurehead of modern New Zealand literature. She garnered initial acclaim in the 1970s with her collection of short stories entitled Waiariki (1975) — the first published book by a Maori woman in New Zealand. She has published six novels and seven short story collections, as well as a number of books for children and a work of non-fiction. She won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki in 1987, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which also won the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. Her children’s story The Kuia and the Spider won the New Zealand Picture Book of the Year in 1982.

portrait photo of Patricia Grace

Also by Patricia Grace

Bird Child and Other Stories
Tuna Wātakirihi Me Ngā Tamariki O Te Tiriti O Toa, Te/Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street
Te Kuia me te Pūngāwerewere/The Kuia and the Spider
From the Centre
Chappy
Ned and Katina: A True Love Story
Ned & Katina
See all

Praise for Cousins

. . . it is robust and powerful. I simply could not put it down. Lyrical and vibrant, smoothly paced and quietly rhythmic, Grace's language moves easily from one person to the next, as the stories unfold.

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, NZ Listener

Cousins is an engrossing story that runs on in the head long after it has finished.

Dominion Sunday Times

Patricia Grace writes with an enviable clarity and power.

Margaret Mahy, Evening Post

This author tells vivid and mesmerizing stories as she blends tribal myth with political realities, and offers shrewd insights into human nature.

Publishers Weekly

A profoundly enlightening and moving work from a respected New Zealand writer.

World Literature Today

A dense, multi-layered novel of interweaving parts and concerns, sensitive, acutely observed, and predominantly serious in both theme and tone, but including also many of those wry, almost tongue-in-cheek situations which Grace is so adept at describing.

Sunday Star-Times
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