Cousins

Mata, Makareta, and Missy, three Maori cousins, once shared a magical childhood moment. They have since followed separate and very different paths, yet their struggles offer insightful glimpses into the lives of contemporary New Zealand women. Patricia Grace's keen eye records the psychological, cultural, and political circumstances that color and circumscribe their worlds in this engaging, compassionate story.

• Patricia Grace, Author

  Patricia Grace is the first Maori woman to publish a collection of short stories (1975). Since then she has published three other short story collections, three award-winning novels, and several children's books. Her novel Dogside Story (UH Press edition, 2002) won the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction. She is widely anthologized and translated into more than eight languages, and is considered not only one of the finest writers in New Zealand and the Pacific, but one of the most important writers of the post-colonial novel in English in the world today.

• A profoundly enlightening and moving work from a respected New Zealand writer.
  —World Literature Today
• Patricia Grace speaks with a voice which is prophetic and memorable.
  —Dominion
• A dense, multi-layered novel of interweaving parts and concerns, sensitive, acutely observed, and predominantly serious in both theme and tone, but including also many of those wry, almost tongue-in-cheek situations which Grace is so adept at describing.
  —Sunday Star