Cover

PENGUIN BOOKS

CHAPPY

Author photo by Grant Maiden

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers. She is the author of six novels, seven short-story collections and several children’s books, as well as non-fiction.

Awards for her work include the Deutz Medal for fiction for the novel Tu at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2005, the New Zealand Fiction award for Potiki in 1987, the Children’s Picture Book of the Year for The Kuia and the Spider in 1982 and the Hubert Church Prose Award for the Best First Book for Waiariki in 1976. She was also awarded the Literaturpreis from Frankfurt in 1994 for Potiki, which has been translated into several languages. Dogside Story was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize in 2001.

Grace received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2006 and was the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature sponsored by the University of Oklahoma in 2008.

Grace was born in Wellington and lives in Plimmerton on ancestral land, in close proximity to her home marae at Hongoeka Bay.

ALSO BY PATRICIA GRACE

NOVELS

Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps

Potiki

Cousins

Baby No-eyes

Dogside Story

Tu

SHORT STORIES

Waiariki

The Dream Sleepers and Other Stories

Electric City and Other Stories

Selected Stories

Collected Stories

The Sky People

Small Holes in the Silence

FOR CHILDREN

The Kuia and the Spider

Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street

The Trolley

Areta and the Kahawai

Maraea and the Albatrosses

OTHER

Wahine Toa

Ned & Katina: A True Love Story

In Praise of Patricia Grace

‘Grace’s wonderful fiction shows us with truth, compassion and humour, the good and bad, ugliness and beauty, strength and fecklessness of contemporary Maori life.’

–Christchurch Press

‘Patricia Grace displays the kind of mastery that comes only from years of writing experience, patient observation and accumulated wisdom.’

–Sunday Star-Times

‘She not only tells a remarkable narrative, but she does so beautifully with such remarkable style.’

–Times Educational Supplement

‘Patricia Grace’s writing is as delicate as Japanese brushwork, yet as poignant and throat-aching as the loss of a loved one.’

–NZ Listener

‘Patricia Grace is an extraordinary storyteller. She writes with insight and with an intense sensitivity and spirituality that is a rare treasure.’

–Christchurch Star

Kerehi Waiariki Grace

Whakapiri ki te tini me te mano, e kore te aroha mōu e mimiti.

(Though you have gone, our love for you does not diminish.)

Prologue