Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Set in the harsh environment of the South Island beaches of New Zealand, this masterful story brings together three singular people in a trinity that reflects their country's varied heritage. Winner of the 1985 Booker-McConnell prize for fiction.

The Whale Rider

by Witi Tame Ihimaera

Eight-year-old Kahu, a member of the Maori tribe of Whangara, New Zealand, fights to prove her love, her leadership, and her destiny. Her people claim descent from Kahutia Te Rangi, the legendary "whale rider." In every generation since Kahutia, a male heir has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir, and the aging chief is desperate to find a successor. Kahu is his only great-grandchild--and... (more)

Once Were Warriors (Vintage International)

Once Were Warriors (Vintage International)

by Alan Duff

Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds... (more)

Potiki (Talanoa : Contemporary Pacific Literature)

Potiki (Talanoa : Contemporary Pacific Literature)

by Patricia Grace

Winner of the 1987 New Zealand Fiction Award 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... (more)

Bone People, the

by Keri Hulme

"This is not just a novel: it's a boggle-the-mind experience."

One Night Out Stealing

by Alan Duff

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

by Witi Tame Ihimaera

Pounamu Pounamu

by Witi Ihimaera

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

by Christina Thompson

An extraordinary love story between a Maori man and an American woman, that inspires a graceful, revelatory search for understanding about the centuries-old collision of two wildly different cultures. Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between... (more)

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

by Alan Duff

Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (New Americanists)

Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (New Americanists)

by Chadwick Allen

Blood Narrative is a comparative literary and cultural study of post-World War II literary and activist texts by New Zealand Maori and American Indians—groups who share much in their responses to European settler colonialism. Chadwick Allen reveals the complex narrative tactics employed by writers and activists in these societies that enabled them to realize unprecedented practical power in making both their... (more)

The Rope of Man

by Witi Tame Ihimaera

THE ROPE OF MAN is two books in one. The first book, TANGI, is set in 1973 and focuses on Tama Mahana, a young 20-year old newspaper reporter working in Wellington, as he attends his father's funeral in Waituhi. The second book, THE RETURN is a sequel, set in 2005; Tama Mahana, now 52, is living in London and is a successful TV anchorman of an international news show. This time it is his mother, Huia, who is... (more)

Pathologizing Practices: The Impact of Deficit Thinking on Education (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education)

Pathologizing Practices: The Impact of Deficit Thinking on Education (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education)

by Carolyn M. Shields

Pathologizing Practices is an innovative cross-cultural study that looks at how deficit thinking pathologizes the lived experiences of children and prevents minority children from achieving their full potential in schools. The book explores the contexts, cultures, and structures of the education systems within which three groups of students-Bedouin, Maori, and Navajo-have been marginalized. Taking a critical... (more)

Song of the StoneBarry Brailsford

Song of the Stone

by Barry Brailsford

'Song of the Stone' is the true story of five remarkable journeys. Barry Brailsford, the highly acclaimed author of 'The Tattooed Land' and 'Greenstone Trails', spent six years writing 'Song of Waitaha', at the invitation of the oldest tribes of New Zealand. This white historian and archaeologist was initiated into the sacred school of learning and sat with knowledge long thought lost. 'Song of the Stone'... (more)

Ask the Posts of the HouseWiti Tame Ihimaera