Bone Talk - Hardcover

The Story Samkad dreams of becoming a mighty headhunter like his father, carrying his own weapons and etching tattoos across his chest to proclaim his greatness as a warrior. His best friend is a girl his age, Little Luki and Little Luki wants to become a mighty warrior too ... except in their culture, girls don't grow up to become warriors. The two friends have no idea about the world outside their isolated mountain village until a boy from the Lowlands turns up ... a boy who can speak many tongues and who tells stories about the world outside that seem ridiculous and unbelievable especially the part about invaders called 'Americans' who are coming to take over the village. Candy Gourlay on why she wrote the book As a young bookworm reading my way through my school library, I read many books with historical settings: poor Oliver Twist, orphaned in Victorian London, Tom Sawyer sneaking onto steam ships on the Mississippi River, kings and swords and knights. But why was not a single book set in the Philippines where I grew up? Why couldn't adventures spring from my history too? Bone Talk is my attempt to fill this story gap. It's an adventure set right in the middle of a cultural collision, when turn-of-the-century American soldiers encountered a headhunting Filipino warrior people. What was it like to encounter the outside world for the first time? What was it like to meet your invader and to realise that everything you knew was about to change? Samkad's people did not write their stories down, so most narratives from the era were written by their enemy, the Americans. I hope Bone Talk 's readers will enjoy seeing the world through Samkad's eyes.