Mutuwhenua - Tapa blanda

Mutuwhenua is the story of Ripeka, who leaves her extended family and its traditional lifestyle to marry Graeme, a Pakeha schoolteacher. In the strange world of the city, Ripeka discovers that she cannot make the break from her whanau, that the old ways are too strong. The first novel by a Maori woman ever published, Mutuwhenua is a powerful, moving story of contrasts between old and new, young and old, Maori and Pakeha.

Patricia Grace has won many awards for her work, including the New Zealand Fiction Award for Potiki in 1987, and being longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which also won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. Patricia lives in Plimmerton near Wellington on the ancestral land of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa in close proximity to her home marae at Hongoeka Bay.