Small Holes in the Silence

Description

This is a fine new collection of short stories by the much-loved Patricia Grace, probably never more popular since the great commercial success of the novel Tu. The feast of stories is varied: urban, rural, New Zealand, overseas, tribal, contemporary. An elderly woman, whose husband has died, gathers firewood on the beach while the appliances in her house fall to bits one by one. Willie falls in love with a statue. Great-grandmother reveals how she chose her husband-to-be - both of them. Rona curses the Moon. Petina tells Raycharles she's looking for a father for her baby. The thread that runs through all the stories, though, is Grace's huge sympathy for the underdog and the perspective of the outsider. The world she depicts is often a stark and unsentimental place, in which people struggle against ageing, rejection, violence and betrayal.

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand's most celebrated writers. She has published over 35 titles, including novels, short-story collections, works of non-fiction and books for children, a number of which have been translated into te reo Maori. Among numerous awards, she won the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1986 for the much-loved Potiki, which also won the New Zealand Fiction Award in 1987. She was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. Tu won the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Fiction Prize and the Deutz Medal for Fiction and Poetry. Her children's story The Kuia and the Spider won the Children's Picture Book of the Year and she has also won the New Zealand Book Awards For Children and Young Adults Te Kura Pounamu Award. Patricia was born in Wellington and lives in Plimmerton on ancestral land, in close proximity to her home marae at Hongoeka Bay.