Pina

Winner of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize 

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize

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A devastating novel about a family torn apart by secrets & the legacy of colonialism, held together by nine-year-old Pina, a girl shouldering the immeasurable weight of her family's traumas. 

Far from Tahiti's postcard-perfect beaches, Ma & Auguste & five of their nine children live a hand-to-mouth life in destitute, run-down Tenaho. Nine-year-old Pina, abused & neglected in equal measure, is the keeper of her family's secrets, though the weight of this knowledge soon proves to be a burden no child could ever bear. A victim of her father's alcoholic rages & the object of her mother's anger & indifference, Pina protects her younger sister, Moïra, as best she can, but a tragic accident upsets the precarious equilibrium of the family, setting them on a path to destruction. 

The fault lines of her family, descendants of Ma'ohi warriors who once fended off European settlers, begin to shift & crack open, laying bare how the past shapes & haunts the present: her brother Pauro falls in love with a Frenchman, her sister Rosa sinks into sexual exploitation as a futile means of escape, her eldest brother August Junior's addictions & temper may lead him into ruin, & Hannah, the oldest daughter who had escaped to France, is beckoned back home, fearing the worst. 

Elegantly translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Pina introduces a bold & profoundly humane anticolonial writer. It's a gut punch of a novel that traces the history of a family, an island, & a people, reaching back to a time before colonial rule & stretching into an imagined, hopeful future of independence & autonomy, offering the promise of redemption.

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Titaua Peu is a Tahitian author known for her politically charged, realistic portrayal of the effects of colonialism on contemporary Polynesia