Dogside Story

Patricia Grace's rich and dramatic novel, threaded with humour, presents a powerful picture of the Maori people in modern times.

Like Grace’s award-winning novel Potiki before it, Dogside Story is set in a Maori coastal community, where the power of the land and the strength of the clan - the whanau - are life-preserving forces. But there are deep conflicts stirring in the whanau. Te Rua is battling for custody of his daughter against his two aunts. But why are they disputing custody and what is really going on? Meanwhile, wider events are encroaching as visitors head toward this East Coast site. There are plans to be put into action, there’s money to be made, and there’s high drama as the millennium turns….But there is conflict in the whanau. 

Patricia Grace is a major New Zealand novelist, short story writer and children’s writer, of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa descent, and is affiliated to Ngati Porou by marriage. Grace has won many national and international awards, including the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for fiction, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, widely considered the most prestigious literary prize after the Nobel. A deeply subtle, moving and subversive writer, in 2007 Grace received a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to literature.