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  • Published: 1 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9781776950676
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $15.99

Potiki




Patricia Grace's classic novel is a work of spellbinding power in which the myths of older times are inextricably woven into the political realities of today.

This classic has been released in the Popular Penguin format to mark 50 years of publishing in New Zealand. The format reaches further back to 1935, when Allen Lane founded Penguin Books with a clear vision: ‘We believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.’
Winning the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1987, Potiki follows a small coastal community threatened by developers. It is a time of fear and confusion — and growing anger. The prophet child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama shares his people's struggles against bulldozers and fast money talk, his all-seeing eye looking forward to a strange and terrible new dawn.

  • Published: 1 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9781776950676
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $15.99

About the author

Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand’s most prominent and celebrated Maori fiction authors and a figurehead of modern New Zealand 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 in New Zealand. 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. Her children’s story The Kuia and the Spider won the New Zealand Picture Book of the Year in 1982.

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Praise for Potiki

A searching examination of human nature [by] a canonical figure in postcolonial and Maori literature . . . a timely arrival, praising the strength and the resilience of the human spirit whilst capturing, in moments of crystallising clarity, the tragic masochism of its pain and sorrow.

Arts Desk