Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors and a figurehead of modern Indigenous literature. She garnered initial acclaim in the 1970s with her collection of short stories entitled Waiariki (1975) - the first published book by a Maori woman. She has published six novels and seven short story collections, as well as a number of books for children and a work of non-fiction. She won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki in 1987, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which also won the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. In 2008 she won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes referred to as 'the American Nobel'.

A searching examination of human nature [by] a canonical figure in postcolonial and Maori literature . . . a timely arrival, praising the strength and the resilience of the human spirit whilst capturing, in moments of crystallising clarity, the tragic masochism of its pain and sorrow.