What Happen Then, Mr Bones?

Time runs backwards. The story opens with a death in the Montague family in Petone, near Wellington, in 2002, and each family member, once dead, is followed back in brief, film-like scenes to an earlier part of their life before leaving the story for good. Through these lives it moves into nineteenth-century New Zealand, with coastal waters red from slaughtered animals, and back to England, to a Montague singed in the Great Fire of London and another struck down by the plague. At its far end stands the ancestor Valentina, modelled on Anne Green, a woman hanged at Oxford who came round on the anatomists' table, and who spends her second life defying the physicians, apothecaries and quacks of seventeenth-century England.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand, United Kingdom, 1651–2002

First published

2004

ISBN

9780143019176 (Penguin Books, New Zealand)