Potiki

A Māori community on the New Zealand coast resists a developer who wants to build a tourist resort on their ancestral land. Grace tells the story through multiple voices — the family, the marae, the carved ancestors who speak from the meeting house — weaving Māori oral tradition into the novel's structure. The land is not a setting. It is a character. The community's relationship with it is spiritual, legal, historical, and ongoing. The most politically precise New Zealand novel on this shelf and the one that most clearly articulates the Māori argument about sovereignty — not as a legal claim but as a relationship with a place.