Settler's Creek

Box Saxton just wants to bury his teenage stepson's body in the churchyard near the farm where Box grew up. What happens, though, when the boy's biological father, a Maori leader, unexpectedly turns up in the days before the funeral and forcibly takes the boy's body? According to Maori custom the boy must be buried in the tribe's ancestral cemetery at the small coastal town of Kaipuna. According to the law there is very little Box can do. With no plan and little hope, Box gets in his old truck and drives north, desperate and heartbroken. SETTLER'S CREEK explores the claims of both indigenous peoples and more recent settlers to have a spiritual link to the land. 'With no flamboyance, but with talent and a scrupulous art, Carl Nixon establishes himself as one of our best younger writers' u Owen Marshall