In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor-a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.
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Māori (New Zealand people)--Fiction. Commitment (Psychology)--Fiction. Racially mixed people--Fiction. Social isolation--Fiction. Women painters--Fiction. Mute persons--Fiction. Shipwrecks--Fiction. Widowers--Fiction.