Tauhou - by Kō & tuku Titihuia Nuttall (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Finalist, 2024 Amazon Canada First Novel Award

Dear grandmother, I am writing this song, over and over again, for you. I am a stranger in this place, he tauhou ahau, reintroducing myself to your land.

Tauhou is an inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, a writer of Māori and Coast Salish descent. This innovative hybrid novel envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand that sit side by side in the ocean.

Each chapter is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On rainforest beaches and grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past -- all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores.

In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.

Review Quotes

[A nuanced portrait] of complicated maternal legacies and the structures -- both natural and built -- through which those legacies are lived and remembered.

Tauhou stretches the geographic imaginary beyond land and into generations -- not just through time or history but by envisioning land through past, present, and future lineages. ... Through recreating geographic boundaries, Nuttall has found a way to understand the complexities of a person's relationship to their culture spatially.

Calling this a novel makes a profound statement about how story is community ... Tauhou focalizes a complex network of relationships between families, friends, and even the locales, flora, and fauna they live among. This novel is not structured upon the familiar beats of narrative arc, and it certainly isn't structured around conflict, though the ongoing struggles of colonialism stalk its periphery. Rather, Tauhou is shaped like a spiderweb whose delicate, and sometimes broken, strands of connectivity are being revealed, and even rebuilt, in the telling.

Tauhou is a search for answers, of finding ways to live with the truth. Some of the stories are like fables, others like poetry, and all are a sheer joy to read. A longing for home resonates, a gift for those of us searching for our island also.

This one's for the lovers of language, lean prose-poetry you can dip in and out of and think about for hours. Best read beside a large body of water.

Profoundly hopeful, invested in futurity and the possibilities that come from solidarity, coalition-building, and community. ... Tauhou successfully proves that a novel need not follow one plot or one set of characters to be wonderfully compelling. ... Casting off convention, Nuttall confidently shows that to address the ongoing legacies of colonialism, we must change how we think of the future, art, and what is possible.

More than merely inventive, Tauhou's geography is a visionary response to the grievous losses of colonization. ... Nuttall's story logic works by accretion, and she has rewards in store for readers willing to forgo the familiar comforts of narrative. ... [A] deeply moving book.