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ERIN can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom.
STAR is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide.
It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began.
A tragicomedy set in the confines of a 1994 Daihatsu Mira, Poorhara is a journey of epic proportions—a poignant, expansive and darkly funny first novel written by a true poorhara.
‘This is a novel to get excited about, a compulsive, absorbing, cinematic work of beauty.’ —Amber French, North & South
'Poorhara is a hilarious and heartbreaking debut with characters so stunningly well-realised they will walk into your dreams at night. It’s a hero's journey with no easy answers – just harsh, furious life with all the pain, the anger and the beauty we can barely hold in or hold together. Rahurahu is a genius.' —essa may ranapiri, author of ransack and echidna
'Rahurahu takes what could otherwise be a heavy story told in a depressing world, and gives it the grace and love that it deserves. . . . In just three hundred pages, following two cousins in a car, Michelle Rahurahu tells the story of a nation in conflict, a deeply disparate society, and a family surviving through it. It is as honest a portrait of Aotearoa as I’ve read all year, and I’m likely to for many years.' —Sam Brooks, Dramatic Pause
Michelle Rahurahu (Ngaati Rahurahu, Ngaati Tahu-Ngaati Whaoa) is a writer who was raised by taangata turi. She was a co-editor of Te Rito o te Harakeke, an anthology of Maaori voices for Ihumaatao. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the IIML, where she won the Modern Letters Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Michael Gifkins Prize for Poorhara.
Cover design: Todd Atticus
