Wellington Book Club: The Last Living Cannibal

Our final book club of 2025!! Crikey.

We're turning our gaze back to Aotearoa fiction. For November, Eden and Mel have chosen The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāruahine, Ngā Rauru)

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Muru is not revenge. Muru is about balance. You put your hands on one of theirs and they had every right to take from you and yours whatever they meant to take, short of a life.

Aotearoa in the 1940s, and the Maori men of Taranaki will not join the Maori battalion because they have lost too much already. Koko is the oldest man in the village, a legend who has lived through the land wars and imprisonment in Dunedin. They whisper of him as the Last Living Cannibal. Koko dotes on his grandson Blackie, and when Blackie is beaten at school, Koko takes up the fight.

But the ghosts of his past are never far away, and when they come calling, they come with muru in mind...

Richly set in Taranaki during the 1940s, The Last Living Cannibal is the epitome of a classic Aotearoa novel, from one of this generation's most promising writers.