The best selling author of 'The Whale Rider' revisits characters he first wrote about 30 years ago. Fuelled by passion, politics, psychic powers and the search for the truth, here is a mature writer at the height of his powers.
First published in 1974, Whanau was Witi Ihimaera's second novel. Thirty years on, Ihimaera presents Whanau II – a courageous and unusual work: Witi has completely revised his original novel, presenting the work from his perspective as a mature writer. This revised edition gains the mature Ihimaera's stylistic refinements and political awareness yet retains all the aroha and anger that powered the 1974 novel.
Inspired, as was the original, by Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood, Whanau II assembles a cast of characters in the rural Maori community of Waituhi: Rongo Mahana, alone in a landscape altered by Pakeha values; Miro Mananui fighting to retain her land; Andrew Whatu, who must leave the village to follow his ambitions; Mattie Jones, who came back to the village defeated by the city; and Nanny Paora, who escapes the present by living in the past. Ihimaera reveals the tensions between traditional and modern, rural and urban that lie within modern Maori society.
In an author's note, Ihimaera explains this unusual process of revisiting an earlier work and building on it, weaving in threads to strengthen and enrich the fabric of this wonderful novel.
