Knucklebones:
a novel
Motuarohia is an island that remembers its past.
Elizabeth Roberton arrives on the remote island in New Zealand in 1839, full of hope. Then her husband disappears, presumed drowned, and she must try to survive in this new wilderness. Two years later, she is about to be murdered.
Cassie steps onto the same beach more than 150 years later, in hiding with her mother. No one must know she is there.
Drawn together by the island’s undercurrent and surrounded by violence, they come face to face. As both struggle to transcend their circumstances, they must decide who fights back and how.
A fictional retelling of the murder of Elizabeth Roberton, that resulted in the first hanging under the Treaty of Waitangi, Knucklebones is a story of the unspeakable circumstances we find ourselves in, and how we transcend them.
