Kataraina is breathtaking, swirling around a repeating incident, given form by the collective memories of members of the Te Au family. Stretching from the distant past, through colonisation, to their uneasy present: “How did the world become so devoid of magic?”

Kataraina Te Au is a child who brings peace and hope to her grandparents, Liz and Jack, yet later feels guilty “that her silence might have allowed Jack to be violent”. She is a girl who researches “how wetlands store a sort of historical knowledge”. She is a 15-year-old young woman at “the original splitting of herself, the moment she was made vulnerable to men forever after”.  She is a woman in a coma, dreaming: “She’s bawling in that coma.”

Kataraina is about the fracturing of women. There is the story of one literally cleaved in two by a jealous husband. There are those split between how they must behave to placate men and their inner turmoil, those pretending to be “happy as a plastic duck” to hide their sorrow, those who must leave their chores half-finished to be at the beck and call of their husbands. The split between a self who knows what will happen and the self who is heading into danger. And there are intergenerational links of trauma – as Kataraina first splits, “Nanny Liz’s faux-fur jacket watched like a cat”.

Kataraina is mesmerising in its distress, in its looming cruelties. Men’s actions made worse by their moments of kindness and caring, women’s bottled-up frustration occasionally exploding and leaving them wondering at their own culpability. People are at the mercy of their (usually white) bosses, their (usually white) rich neighbours, their (usually white) ‘saviours’, or of those bigger and stronger than them. And the land is also at the mercy of others, the land that was obviously terra nullius, belonging to no-one – until the surveyors came.

As well as the anchor of the repeating incident “the girl shot the man”, is the geographical anchor of the kūkūwai, the swamp. Drained a century ago, but refusing to leave, it is now filling up again – with salt water, with tears? There is an area where “just looking at the ground made you feel confused”. It defies fencing, a puzzle as there’s no reason for the lines “to lose their purpose, to become pliable as a silver chain necklace”.

The swamp hides past incidents and is home to the one with “inky-golden eyes, a pelt of eelgrass”, a danger that has become a source of hope. Meanwhile “a kuia’s cup of tea had a snake’s ghost spilling out to see the fuss.” And Kataraina is searching for something that will make her feel less like a person, to not be “this nervous system held up by bones and muscles, kept warm by fat, firing on oxygen and glucose”.

Kataraina is full of extraordinary characters, those who have read the author’s Auē will remember many of them. For example, the kids Ārama and Beth, much more self-aware than in Auē, and at one time mistaken for ghosts. The refuge that is Tom Aitken: “Didn’t kill anyone last night, did you, Kat?” And there is Nanny Liz, who walked barefoot to the swamp at night “and hoped a fistless monster would come and swallow her alive”.

And there are new characters, such as Cairo, part of a research team investigating why the swamp is rising, quoting Hone Tuwhare as she works. She is drawn by the ghostly smell of speargrass, leading to evidence of the violent history of the area. There is the question of what to do with the findings of research when intergenerational and lived experience is a part of it – can that ever be conveyed?

Kataraina is extremely tense in places, with its constant threat of violence, but it is also full of the love and support people, and the land, can extend. Both Nanny Liz and the swamp are talked of as being purifying kidneys – her for other people’s troubles, the kūkūwai for inorganic impositions. The novel has a chaotic structure that is easily navigable, with its strong recurring themes, its temporal moorings to the incident, and its geographic mooring of the swamp. It also has a useful family tree of characters at the beginning.

I found Kataraina a wonderful book, and I’m sure it will be as successful as the multiple -award-winning  Auē.