Potiki was first published in 1986 but I - in my ignorance - hadn't heard of Patricia Grace until I went to New Zealand in 2019 and asked, in a bookshop, for recommendations of fiction by NZ authors. This is a devastating story - or stories - about the ruin wreaked by white people on Maori communities and our lack of connectoin with the land and its riches and how we cannot - without severe repercussions - tear up the earth and plunder it and force Maori people to move from the land that they never think of as 'theirs' but with which they have the kind of profound connection and for which they have a respect and reverence that we've lost. These losses mean we think it's just fine to develop resorts and drive roads through Maori communities to do so. But this is also a story of resistance and hope: it ends with a sense, a feeling (and in the Maori language) that the ancestors will protect the earth and its people through its living people, as long as they relearn - in our case - the language and the ways of connection and cease the language and the ways of destruction.