Baby No-eyes

Patricia Grace

July 2002 · Sold by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

About this eBook

This major novel merges contemporary headlines with stories of a heartfelt family history. 'Do you hear the people calling?' 'No.' 'See there, dummy, you're nowhere near dead.' 'Well, I don't believe you. How would you know?' 'Of course I know, I do, I do, I know all about it . . .' Tawera and his sister are inseparable, in a relationship that is impossible for others to share. In fact his whole whanau is bonded by secrets, a genealogy stitched together by shame, joy, love and sometimes grief. This is an account of the mysteries that operate at many levels between generations, where the present is the pivot, the centre of the spiral, looking outward to the past and future that define it. There's a way the older people have of telling a story, a way where the beginning is not the beginning, the end is not the end . . .

About the author

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors and a figurehead of modern Indigenous literature. She garnered initial acclaim in the 1970s with her collection of short stories entitled Waiariki (1975) - the first published book by a Maori woman. She has published six novels and seven short story collections, as well as a number of books for children and a work of non-fiction. She won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki in 1987, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which also won the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. In 2008 she won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes referred to as 'the American Nobel'.