Mapped
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
The West Coast of the South Island, Te Tai Poutini: a narrow strip of black-sand beaches, tidal lagoons and rainforest pinned between the Southern Alps and the Tasman Sea. Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a tower she built on the coast near the Okarito lagoon; the mute child Simon and the Maori man Joe come into her solitude. The map runs the wet, wild coast from Okarito north to the old gold port of Hokitika, with one journey east across the island to Christchurch. The novel is steeped in Maori language and Kai Tahu presence, and greenstone, pounamu, runs through it.
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The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
A gold-rush mystery set in Hokitika on the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island in 1866, where a newcomer, Walter Moody, stumbles into a secret council of twelve men trying to make sense of a fortune, a dead hermit, a vanished young prospector and a prostitute found half-dead. The boomtown is real and exact: the hotels and shipping offices of Revell Street, the deadly bar at the mouth of the Hokitika River, the gold claims out toward the Arahura, and the gaol above the town.
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