Gradually it becomes clear that Simon is a deeply traumatised child, whose strange behaviours Joe is unable to cope with.

Horrified, she initially says nothing to Joe, but suggests they travel to her family's bach (holiday home) by the beach for a break.

After returning home from the holiday, Simon sees the aftermath of a violent death and seeks Kerewin out for support, but she is angry with him for stealing one of her prized possessions.

Simon reacts by punching her; she instinctively hits him in the chest and in response he kicks in the side of her guitar, a gift from her estranged mother.

Joe is released quickly but sent to prison for three months for child abuse, and in the meantime Kerewin leaves town and demolishes her tower.

Simon eventually recovers, albeit with some loss of hearing and brain damage, and is sent to live in foster care against his wishes.

Although she visits a doctor who says he is concerned it may be stomach cancer, she refuses to allow him to investigate further and insists he write her a prescription for sleeping pills.

[3][4] In the short prologue at the start of the novel, the then-unnamed characters are described as "nothing more than people by themselves", but together "the hearts and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, the instruments of change".

[20] The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature describes the three as becoming "a new multicultural group, founded on Māori spirituality and traditional ritual, who offer transformative hope to a country stunted by the violence of its divided colonial legacy".

[21] At the end of the book Joe and Simon take her last name, not for sentimental reasons but for what Kerewin describes as "good legal sense".

[24][25][26] An early review by New Zealand writer and academic Peter Simpson noted how particularly apt it was for the book to have been published by the Spiral collective, because "the spiral form is central to the novel's meaning and design; it is in effect the code of the work informing every aspect from innumerable local details to the overall structure".

[34] The novel frequently features the dreams of the three characters, and in the final section the narrative shifts from realism to mysticism.

[35] The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature observes that the novel requires active concentration from the reader, given the mixture of poetry and prose, New Zealand slang and Māori phrases, realistic and supernatural elements, and tonal shifts from ordinary and banal to lyrical and sacred.

[32] As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Hulme began writing short stories about a mute child called Simon Peter.

[10] When Hulme began submitting her draft novel to publishers, she was told to trim it down and rewrite it; she reworked the manuscript seven times, with some assistance from her mother on editing the early chapters.

[10] The novel has been translated into nine languages (Dutch, Norwegian, German, Swedish, Finnish, Slovak, French, Danish and Spanish).

"[4] It was praised by authors such as Alice Walker, who said in a letter to Spiral that it "is just amazingly wondrously great",[30] and fellow New Zealand author Witi Ihimaera, who said he "was totally amazed that a book that I knew had been put together by a small feminist publication company had made it to the top of the literary world".

"[30] More recently, Sam Jordison, reviewing the book in 2009 for The Guardian, described Hulme's writing as a "morass of bad, barely comprehensible prose", and felt that by the end of the novel "the-all-too realistic story of abuse and trauma breaks down into absurd mysticism".

[50] Stead and other critics have called attention to the way that the novel describes Simon being violently abused, yet also treats the perpetrator, Joe, as a sympathetic character.

[54][55] Stead criticised the novel for its portrayals of violence and child abuse; in his words, the book leaves "a bitter aftertaste, something black and negative deeply ingrained in its imaginative fabric".

The Washington Post called it a novel of "sweeping power" and an "original, overwhelming, near-great work of literature, which does not merely shed light on a small but complex and sometimes misunderstood country, but also, more generally, enlarges our sense of life's possible dimensions".

[58] Claudia Tate for The New York Times called the novel "provocative", and said it "summons power with words, as in a conjurer's spell".

[63][64][39] The judges of the 1985 Booker Prize were Norman St John-Stevas, Joanna Lumley, Marina Warner, Nina Bawden and Jack Walter Lambert.

[66] St John-Stevas, who sat as chairman of the judging panel, said it was a "a highly poetic book, filled with striking imagery and insights".

They recited a karanga (Māori call) as they accepted the award, which led to Philip Purser of The Sunday Telegraph describing them as "a posse of keening harpies".

[6] When asked what the Booker Prize meant to her, Hulme said: "The difference will be having a large amount of money and being able to keep doing the things I like – reading, writing, painting, fishing and building.

[1] In 2005, a public conference was held at the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington to mark 20 years since the Booker Prize win.

[73] In July 2022, her family announced that the original novel manuscript would be sold at auction, with the proceeds to be used to support Māori authors, in accordance with Hulme's final wishes.