Small Holes in the Silence

by Patricia Grace

This is a fine collection of short stories by the much-loved Patricia Grace, probably never more popular since the great commercial success of the novel Tu.

The feast of stories is varied: urban, rural, New Zealand, overseas, tribal, contemporary.

An elderly woman, whose husband has died, gathers firewood on the beach while the appliances in her house fall to bits one by one. Willie falls in love with a statue.

Great-grandmother reveals how she chose her husband-to-be both of them.

Rona curses the Moon.

Petina tells Raycharles she's looking for a father for her baby.

The thread that runs through all the stories, though, is Grace's huge sympathy for the underdog and the perspective of the outsider. The world she depicts is often a stark and unsentimental place, in which people struggle against ageing, rejection, violence and betrayal.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

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 began writing early, while teaching and raising her family of seven children, and has since 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.

Reviews

[Mariana · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Patricia Grace wrote a short story called “Eben” about a developmentally disabled man growing up in an orphanage and this woman comes to visit him but they won’t let her adopt him because she’s not married. But she can take him out for the weekend. So one weekend, after she gave notice at her job and her house, she picks him up and they move to a new city. They live together many years until she dies. For a while, he lives in an institution, and then is moved into a group. The whole story is a tribute to those 2 people.

[Joan Barton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just didn't engage me . Read the first two stories and had to move on.

[Maria Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patricia Grace is an astounding writer. I enjoyed some of the stories in this collection but had a hard time making sense of others.

[Robbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a mixed bag with short stories. Some are great, some not so much. At least they are all short, so if they're no good, they're over before too long.