With the help of the wider Read NZ community (namely our followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), we’ve compiled some favourite New Zealand novels by Māori, Pasifika or other non-Pākehā writers (as an update on this 2017 list).

Many readers recommended the same novel, and there were multiple instances of a list of novels by the same author. We have chosen the most-suggested titles from each author in most cases. We also had poetry, plays, essays, non-fiction, memoir and children’s books suggested, but we have just listed novels here. Where we can, we've linked to the author's Writer's File on our site where you can go for more information about their work.

There have been some excellent, similar book lists curated over the past few weeks, and we especially liked Ruby Solly’s account of a year of only reading Māori authors.

Booksellers offered up a Race Relations Reading list in early June, and Pantograph Punch published their Black authors: A Reading List more recently.

Here’s a collection from the ANZ LitLovers blog, and Penguin New Zealand’s Māori literature and non-fiction book list is here. You might also like to check out Huia Publishers' online bookshop - their published novels are listed here.

Obviously, ours is nothing near a complete collection, but rather a snapshot in time and place. As always, we urge you to cast your net widely when choosing the books you read – your local library and/or bookshop will also have some great recommendations!

We hope you enjoy this crowd-sourced reading list. Please let us know your own picks, if they’re not represented here.

Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa) – Potiki, 1986
Patricia Grace was our most-recommended author for this list, with readers nominating five or six different Grace novels. We chose the one most often mentioned, 1986's Potiki, whichtells the story of an indigenous community and their struggle for survival against the attempts of land developers to buy, bully and coerce them off their land. Grace won the New Zealand Fiction Award for Potiki.

Alan Duff (Ngāti Rangitihi and Ngāti Tūwharetoa) – Once Were Warriors Trilogy, 1990, 1996, 2002
Once Were Warriors is an incredibly affecting story of an urban Māori whānau. The novel is written in juxtaposed interior monologues, making its style stand out from other works. It was winner of the PEN Best First Book Award, was runner-up in the Goodman Fielder Wattie Award, and was made into the award-winning film of the same name in 1994. Its 1996 sequel, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? won the fiction prize at the Montana Book Awards and was also made into a hit film.

Whiti Hereaka (Tūwharetoa and Te Arawa) - Bugs, 2013
Bugs is about the unfolding lives of three young people in their last year of school in small-town New Zealand. Life is slow, and it seems not much happens in town or in Jez and Bugs’s lives. But when Stone Cold arrives, the three come to different conclusions about how to deal with being trapped in a small town and at the bottom of the heap.

James George (Ngapuhi) - Ocean Roads, 2006
Sweeping from New Mexico’s desert to Auckland’s wild west coast beaches, from bloodied jungles of Vietnam to the dry valleys of Antarctica, Ocean Roads is a powerful, unnerving story of three generations of a family scarred by war., and the love and understanding that grows from the wastelands of conflict.

Lisa Cherrington, (Ngāti Hine, Ngapuhi) - The People-Faces, 2007
Described as a sensitive, insightful and eerily atmospheric novel, the author takes her professional knowledge as a psychologist, combines it with storytelling flair, and explores the difficult and complex life of a family affected by mental illness.

Tina Makereti, (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi) - Where The Rekohu Bone Sings, 2014
It has been described as 'remarkable' first book that confronts the issues of violent domination and cross-cultural conflict with flair and subtlety. Louise O'Brien reviewed the novel, calling it 'a thoughtful tracing of the complexity of being Moriori, Māori and Pākehā and of finding a place of belonging between cultures. That it does all this while also telling a compelling story is impressive indeed.'

Tania Roxborogh, Bastion Point - 2017
Winner of the Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction, the judges praised the book for its deft and sensitive touch. “Race relations in the 1970s are revealed to the reader through the eyes and heart of a young Māori girl wondering what is wrong with the grown-up world around her. Here the true craft of Tania Roxborogh’s writing is revealed. We can wonder with her," they wrote.

Lani Wendt Young, The Telesa Series, from 2011
The Telesa novels have been described as 'Twilight... Pasifika style'. Thrilling love stories inspired by Pacific mythology, readers around the globe have happily immersed themselves in the world of Leila and Daniel. Lani Wendt Young also wrote and delivered the 2019 Book Council Lecture, Stories from the Wild: Read and Writing in the Digital Age, which can be found here.

Steph Matuku, (Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga, Te Āti Awa) - Flight of the Fantail, 2018
A busload of high school students crashes in bush in a remote part of Aotearoa. Only a few of the teenagers survive; they find their phones don’t work, there’s no food, and they’ve only got their wits to keep them alive. An excellent, spooky read.

Witi Ihimaera, (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki descent, with close affiliations to Tūhoe, Te Whānau-a-Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, and Ngāi Tāmanuhiri) - The Parihaka Woman, 2011
Many of Ihimaera's books were recommended, but this was the most-mentioned title. A richly imaginative and original novel that weaves together fact and fiction, The Parihaka Woman sets the remarkable story of Erenora against the historical background of the turbulent and compelling events that occurred in Parihaka during the 1870s and 1880s.

Becky Manawatu, (Ngāi Tahu) - Auē, 2019
First-time novelist Becky Manawatu introduces readers to the orphaned Arama, who is deposited in rural Kaikōura with relatives, and his brother Taukiri, a young man fending for himself in the big smoke. There is violence and sadness and rawness in this book, but buoyant humour, too, and remarkable insights into the minds of children and young men. Aue was the winner of the Jan Medlicott Acrn Prize for Fiction in 2020.

Renée, (Ngāti Kahungunu) -The Wild Card, 2019
Ruby Palmer has been dealt a rough hand. She was left in a kete at the back door of the Porohiwi Home for Children when she was a baby, and then at seven she discovered that Betty – who stopped the bad stuff happening to Ruby at the Home – had drowned. Published in 2019, The Wild Card is Renée's debut crime novel.

Sharon Lam, Lonely Asian Woman - 2019
Focusing on the daily life of Paula, a young Wellington woman looking for love and adventure, this novel features a cast of interesting characters including Paula's friends, a baby, a questionable-smelling microwave, and a supermarket trolley loaded with cheesecakes.

Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai), Rangatira
Based on the true story of an 1863 trip to England by a group of rangatira - including her tupuna, Paratene Te Manu - Rangatira won the fiction categories of both the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards. The novel was described by NZ Books as an 'extraordinary literary achievement and probably the best of recent New Zealand historical novels’.

Alison Wong, As the Earth Turns Silver, 2009
From the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, from Kwangtung, China to Wellington and Dunedin and the battlefields of the Western Front, spans this story of two families. Yung faces a new land that does not welcome the Chinese. Alone, Katherine struggles to raise her children and find her place in the world. In a climate of hostility towards the foreign newcomers, Katherine and Yung embark on a poignant and far-reaching love affair .

Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home, 1973
This important novel describes a young man from a migrant Samoan family and his love affair with a fellow (Pakeha) student. Hard-hitting in its descriptions of racism, frank in its evocation of youthful sexuality, even-handed but also harsh and tender in its vision of flawed humanity, the novel was immediately recognised as important, not only for its subject material but because of its success in fusing literary styles with colloquial speech and oral narratives.

Apirana Taylor, (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Ruanui) Five Strings, 2017
This novel is an unusual and poignant love story that traces the day-to-day lives of two people living at the bottom of the heap, with traditional Māoritanga an important part of the novel. Taylor described his hope to ‘write a simple love story based on two characters caught up in life’s destructive dance . . . I wanted to portray the sadness of wasted lives.’

JP Pomare, Call Me Evie, 2019
Described as a 'literary thriller that draws upon the fallibility of the human brain and the faculty of memory,' JP Pomare's first novel explores many psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, trauma induced psychosis, memory loss and neuroplasticity.

Brannavan Gnanalingam, Sodden Downstream, 2017
This novel charts the course of a single day in the life of Sita, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, as she tries to journey from her home in Lower Hutt to her cleaning job in Wellington in the face of a ‘once in a century’ storm, so that her boss doesn’t terminate her contract. Sodden Downstream deals with inequality in Aotearoa, and the struggles of the working poor face in a world that too often has no sympathy for them.