Book Author Becky Manawatu
Rights Available Translation rights available excl. France, Bulgaria, Turkey, Uruguay and Argentina
Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home. But Ārama is braver than he looks, and with his friend Beth and her dog, he feels like he might be strong enough to turn back the tide of sorrow. As long as there’s aroha to give and stories to tell and a good supply of plasters.
Here is a novel that is both raw and sublime, a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction. Haere mai, Becky Manawatu.
Auē means howl or cry or lament in Māori, aroha means love, and plasters is the Kiwi word for bandaids, which Ari puts on himself to deal with the pain inside. Auē is told through four narrators whose stories weave together out of the past and into the present: the ghost of Taukiri’s mother; Taukiri; Ārama or Ari; Taukiri’s mother, Jade, and his murdered father, Toko, until there is some sort reconciliation between those that are left.
Here is a novel that is about personal pain rooted in the past that has grown from a wider story that is called colonialism and its devastating impact on the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has captured the imagination of New Zealanders in the way Once Were Warriors and The Bone People did before.
Awards
Winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020
Winner of the MitoQ Best First Book Award for Fiction 2020
Winner Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel 2020.
Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.
Auē has been on the NZ fiction bestsellers list for two years.
About the Author
Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) was born in Nelson, raised in Waimangaroa on the West Coast, and then moved to live in Germany and Italy, where her husband was playing rugby and where she wrote the first drafts of her novel. She returned to the West Coast with her family and works full-time as a writer. Auē is her first novel and she is writing the sequel.
