Tiare

A year has passed since Materena Mahi's career took a surprising turn from champion professional cleaner to champion professional listener, 'star of the radios'. Everyone in the family is impressed by her new celebrity status, everyone that is except for her lay-about husband Pito, but no matter, Materena's family have never liked him. With the children grown-up and the radio show a huge success, for the first time in her life Materena has had little to worry about, she's even found time to take driving lessons. But one day all this changes when a listener asks Materena just exactly what the Tahitian way means to her. 'It means belonging to a family,' Materena explains. 'And being Tahitian means being diplomatic with the relatives because you're going to bump into your relatives day after day after day until you die, so it's important to get along.' As the calls flood in, Materena realises how many of her women listeners are torn in half over their identities and families. And for the first time in a long time, Materena takes out her birth certificate and reads again and again the words Father Unknown and then she decides, once and for all, that she must find her father, the French militaire her mother fell madly in love with and who never knew he had a daughter. But before she can even start her search an unexpected arrival in the form of her baby granddaughter, Tiare, disturbs the peaceful routine of the Mahi household.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.