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  • Published: 30 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9780143573784
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

Potiki




A prize-winning classic novel, as relevant today as when it was first written.

Patricia Grace's classic novel is a work of spellbinding power in which the myths of older times are inextricably woven into the political realities of today.
In a small coastal community threatened by developers who would ravage their lands it is a time of fear and confusion – and growing anger. The prophet child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama shares his people's struggles against bulldozers and fast money talk. When dramatic events menace the marae, his grief threatens to burst beyond the confines of his twisted body. His all-seeing eye looks forward to a strange and terrible new dawn.

Potiki won the New Zealand Book Awards in 1987.

  • Published: 30 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9780143573784
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

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.

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Praise for Potiki

A searching examination of human nature [by] a canonical figure in postcolonial and Maori literature . . . a timely arrival, praising the strength and the resilience of the human spirit whilst capturing, in moments of crystallising clarity, the tragic masochism of its pain and sorrow.

Arts Desk