Candice Tutauha’s debut novel Rua is about a young Maori woman learning to navigate the world on her own terms. She dreams of becoming a writer and one day moving to New York City to begin a life far removed from the one she knows.
In her tight-knit community, where whānau is everything and loyalty runs deep, gang tensions ripple through daily life, eroding the relationships that hold it together. A day of celebration ends in tragedy. In the aftermath, a soldier’s diary from the Taranaki Wars draws Rua into long-buried truths and presents her with choices that will inevitably shape who she becomes.
