SOURCE: “Fiction from the World's Edge,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. xlv-xlvii.

In the following review of The Bone People, King examines the feminist aspects of the novel, praising Hulme for her skill and innovations.

That Keri Hulme's only previous book is a good volume of poems published in New Zealand may explain why the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement complained about the nomination of The Bone People for the Booker Prize—or why the Sunday Times claimed that the nomination was reward enough. The award of England's prestigious literary prize is only the latest episode in the unusual history of this unusual novel. Rejected by New Zealand commercial and small presses, it was eventually published by Spiral, a feminist collective; and it became a local sensation, winning the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and, later, the Mobil Corporation Pegasus Prize for Literature, “to...