Well, Jane Stafford, you can stick this in your pipe and smoke it, as my mum says. Despite a savaging from you in your dark and grim little world, our Keri has emerged it seems, triumphant, with pounamu daggers gleaming.

Just yesterday, Louisiana State University Press, which happens to be Keri Hulme’s US publisher, loaded up a new edition of The Bone People onto its homepage: it’s being launched, in hardback, for its 20th birthday. Which rather quashes, Jane, your snippy assertion that TBP ‘is now unread, save by earnest German tourists and involuntary readers in university classes’. I read it myself not long ago for about the fifth time I think, and it remains one of the count-on-two-hands books I’ve read that incites sharp intakes of breath and tears. Even when you know what’s coming.

Check out The Listener articles that I’m referring to if you didn’t a couple of weeks ago – one by Steve Braunias, the other by Ms Stafford. Yes, Stonefish is a bit loose, but what a sad world it would be if everything was as tight as your botty, Jane, for god’s sake loosen UP!

I’m halfway through it and my favourite bit so far is from Sometimes I dream I’m driving. The car she drives regularly in her dreams is the grand old family Super Snipe, and quite often her Nana’s scullery (‘redolent with homemade soap and old lino’) is

just over the backseat of the Snipe, somehow wedged in there before the boot. More often, Uncle Bill’s shed is there, with the ton of coal in the corner coalbox, Granddad’s anvils and vices … and best of all, Uncle Bill’s gun cupboard, with the evil knives we weren’t allowed to use, the two shotguns … A reassuring optional extra, the shed, for any vehicle, even the Snipe which had haul-down armrests and pullout ashtrays and gasp wow a radio with buttons that would whisk you from one preset station to another that (snick) quick.

Anyway, make your own mind up. Obviously there do exist ‘editors who can tell what works and what doesn't’ else The Bone People wouldn’t be being internationally reprinted in it’s 20th year. It’s not something that many NZ writers have achieved, maybe only Katherine Mansfield, and not in her own (admittedly short) lifetime. And Jane – I’m not accusing you of being unpatriotic or anything remotely approaching that, but this is a substantial achievement and one that we can all be proud of. So grab a Swanndri and go fishing, love. Somewhere nice, eh?