The Bone People

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.

Kerewin Holmes

Kerewin's tower, near Okarito

Part One

Kerewin Holmes, a painter estranged from her family, has built a tall stone tower on the coast and lives there alone, self-sufficient and walled off from other people. Her solitude is broken when a mute boy climbs in through a window. Okarito, the small West Coast settlement where the author herself made her home, sits behind the same dunes and lagoon.

Part One

inspired by The tower is invented, but its ground is not. Keri Hulme lived at Okarito, on this coast, in a house she built herself, and the novel's stone tower stands on the same shore. Sited at Okarito township as the nearest real anchor.

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Kerewin Holmes

The Tasman Sea beach, Okarito

Part One

The long grey beach on the open Tasman, all driftwood and surf, is where much of the coastal life of the book happens: walks, salvage, the slow forming of a strange found family between the woman, the boy and the man. The West Coast surf here is real and dangerous, the sea that carries wreckage ashore.

Part One

explicit The beach below Okarito is a real strand on the open Tasman; sited at the shore just west of the settlement as a representative point.

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