Checkerboard HilI is a story of belonging, dislocation, misunderstandings, identity and fractured relationships.
When a family member dies in Australia, Ria flies from New Zealand and returns to the family and home in Australia she suddenly left decades before as a teenager. Waiting for her return are her husband and son in New Zealand. Neither family has met the other, and Ria has always kept her Māori, Australian, New Zealand identities and lives separate. But the family tensions, unfinished arguments, connections to places and meeting of former friends, lead Ria to revisit her memories and reflect on the social and cultural tensions and racism she experienced, and the decisions she made. The novel confronts the complexities of families, secrets and trauma and the way these play out across generations. It also explores the ways in which Māori cultural traditions and tikanga are transmuted and transformed across the Tasman, across time and space.
Jade Kake is director and founder of Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism and has a Master of Architecture degree. She is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Jade has written Rebuilding the Kāinga – Lessons from Te Ao Hurihuri, and chapters in collections about architecture and design and has also written for Stuff, The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, ArchitectureNOW and Metro. She has won awards for architectural writing, received the Emerging Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2019, and received the Copyright Licensing New Zealand and New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa Writers’ Award in 2021. In 2020, she was a participant on Te Papa Tupu writers’ mentoring programme, and this is her first novel.
