In Chappy, home is an expanded Pacific circle – New Zealand, Japan, Hawaii.

Though this new novel begins in contemporary Europe, Grace’s true concern as a writer is the ancestral home, the place where stories begin, where history is alive in the present, and where adventurers return. There’s a stubbornness to Grace’s kaupapa, perhaps. One character in Chappy recalls his youthful impatience with listening to recitations of whakapapa at weddings and funerals, until he realised that these “are the moments when all time becomes present and you understand that you are merely a bead on an unbroken necklace which is without beginning or end.” As with much of the work of Witi Ihimaera and Louise Erdrich, there’s a hint of didacticism and of nostalgia for a rural past – “the land, and the old life” – when rituals were inherited, not explained. Grace is a quiet and persistent presence in New Zealand literature, a groundbreaker who is, at the same time, old-fashioned in the calmness of her tone, the particularity of her focus, and her abiding interest in the particularities of Māori customs and stories. Sparked by the wartime diary of Grace’s father, a member of the Māori Battalion, Tu should be a major nation-defining motion picture by now (Grace has already adapted it for the theatre). It’s over a decade since Patricia Grace’s last novel, the moving, cinematic Tu – an ambitious book about war and its temptations, adventures and devastations for the men who went and the families left behind.

Unbroken paula morris