n Alan Duff’s harrowing New Zealand novel , his protagonist Beth Heke, a Māori woman desperately trying to keep her family together in a community benighted by poverty and abuse, has an epiphany: her home, like those of everyone she knows, has no books. The absence bothers her and she eventually realises why: “… it was because a bookless society didn’t stand a show in this modern world, not a damn show. And I live in it, don’t I? And
