> Skip to content
  • Published: 26 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143020998
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.95

Small Holes in the Silence




This is a fine new collection of short stories by the much-loved Patricia Grace, probably never more popular since the great commercial success of the novel Tu.
The feast of stories is varied: urban, rural, New Zealand, overseas, tribal, contemporary.
An elderly woman, whose husband has died, gathers firewood on the beach while the appliances in her house fall to bits one by one. Willie falls in love with a statue.
Great-grandmother reveals how she chose her husband-to-be both of them.
Rona curses the Moon.
Petina tells Raycharles she's looking for a father for her baby.
The thread that runs through all the stories, though, is Grace's huge sympathy for the underdog and the perspective of the outsider. The world she depicts is often a stark and unsentimental place, in which people struggle against ageing, rejection, violence and betrayal.
Also available as an eBook

  • Published: 26 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143020998
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.95

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.

Also by Patricia Grace

See all
penguin pop image
penguin pop image