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Potiki
Patricia Grace
Novel, 1986
A Māori coastal community fights developers threatening its ancestral land, showing whānau life, storytelling and tensions over land rights.
Books set in New Zealand
Eight books by writers from New Zealand, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Potiki and The Bone People.
About the literature of New Zealand
New Zealand has produced two Booker Prize winners: Keri Hulme, for The Bone People in 1985, and Eleanor Catton, for The Luminaries in 2013. Hulme's novel draws together a reclusive artist, a mute boy washed up on the South Island coast and his Māori foster father; Catton's is a mystery among gold-rush prospectors in 1860s Hokitika.
Most New Zealand fiction is in English, but Māori traditions of oral storytelling, song and whakapapa (genealogy) lie behind much Māori writing, and questions of land and belonging between Māori and Pākehā, New Zealanders of European descent, recur. Patricia Grace's Potiki shows a coastal Māori community resisting developers who threaten its ancestral land, and Janet Frame recalls her South Island childhood and years in psychiatric hospitals in An Angel at My Table.
By writers from New Zealand
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The Bone People
Keri Hulme
Novel, 1983
Booker-winning novel of a fractured trio on the remote South Island coast, weaving Māori and Pākehā heritage, land and belonging.
Once Were Warriors
Alan Duff
Novel, 1990
Urban Māori family life in a poor Auckland state-housing area, confronting violence, cultural dislocation and alienation.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame
Memoir, 1984
Autobiography of a childhood in small-town 1920s–30s South Island, then education, mental hospitals and writing in mid-century New Zealand.
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
Novel, 2013
Booker-winning mystery set among 1860s Hokitika gold-rush prospectors on the West Coast of the South Island.
Owls Do Cry
Janet Frame
Novel, 1957
Novel of a working-class Wairarapa family growing up in poverty, expressing the limits of small-town mid-century New Zealand life.
Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies
Witi Ihimaera
Novel, 1994
Rival Māori shearing gangs on the East Coast in the 1950s, showing family power, rural culture and tradition.
The Whale Rider
Witi Ihimaera
Novel, 1987
A Māori girl in a Gisborne-area coastal village challenges patriarchal tradition, drawing on ancestral whale legend and tribal identity.
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