192 pp. May 1995
paper, ISBN 978-0-8248-1706-0, $19.00
|
Keywords: |
literature
Pacific
Polynesia
textbook |
|
Potiki
by Patricia Grace
Talanoa: Contemporary Pacific Literature
Winner of the 1987 New Zealand Fiction Award
"What I enjoy most about the writing of Patricia Grace is the warmth of feeling, the depth, the aroha; the delight in the quirks of people and the poignancy; the sensitivity of the writing and the poetic quality of her descriptions." --Zealandia"[Grace] is at her best portraying the lives of her characters, from their daily tasks (eel-fishing and cooking) to the stories they tell-both real hard-luck stories and ancestral myths.... The writing here is often elegant in its simplicity (the first-person sections in particular are beguilingly direct....) and the information about Maori life intriguing." --Publishers Weekly
This compelling novel will resonate for people everywhere who find their livelihood threatened by "Dollarmen" -- property speculators advocating golf courses, high rises, shopping malls, and tourist attractions. In Potiki, one community's response to attacks on their ancestral values and symbols provides moving affirmation of the relationship between land and the people who live on it.
For sale in the U.S. and its dependencies
Patricia Grace is the first Maori woman to publish a collection of short stories (1975). Since then she has published three other short story collections, three award-winning novels, and several children's books. Her novel Dogside Story (UH Press edition, 2002) won the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction. She is widely anthologized and translated into more than eight languages, and is considered not only one of the finest writers in New Zealand and the Pacific, but one of the most important writers of the post-colonial novel in English in the world today.
|
