Novels
- The Descendants (2007)
- The Possibilities (2014)
- Juniors (2015)
- How to Party With an Infant (2016)
- Testimony from Your Perfect Girl (2019)
Collections
- House of Thieves (2005)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Kaui Hart Hemmings Books Overview
The Descendants
Narrated in a bold, fearless, unforgettable voice and set against the lush, panoramic backdrop of Hawaii, The Descendants is a stunning debut novel about an unconventional family forced to come together and re create its own legacy. Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors were financially and culturally progressive one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state’s largest landowners. Now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control: Ten year old Scottie is a smart ass with a desperate need for attention, and seventeen year old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. Matt s charismatic, thrill seeking, high maintenance wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat racing accident and will soon be taken off life support. The Kings can hardly picture life without her, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them and spurs them into surprising actions. Before honoring Joanie s living will, Matt must gather her friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation made worse by the sudden discovery that there is one person who hasn t been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair, quite possibly the one man she ever truly loved. Forced to examine what he owes not only to the living but to the dead, Matt takes to the road with his daughters to find his wife s lover, a memorable journey that leads to both painful revelations and unforeseen humor and growth.
House of Thieves
These unique stories of upper class Hawaiian families reveal with unsentimental insight and straightforward prose the complex forces that bind family members together in love and hate. Like the fierce, powerful, young characters that appear in her stories, Kaui Hart Hemmings demands our immediate attention. In this exciting debut collection of short stories, Hemmings establishes herself as one of the most original, unapologetic, and honest young voices to come out of the next batch of freshly schooled fiction writers. A member of upper class Hawaiian society, she has set the beautiful island as a backdrop, indeed a foil, to describe the small torments and victories of growing up and finding one’s place. Bold, frustrated teenagers and the adults who raise them wrestle with one another over the age old issues of deprived freedom, misguided love, being cool, and being true, and they experience together the loneliness of feeling miserable in paradise. Hemmings’s tart, confident voice plunges us headfirst into the unfamiliar world of a Hawaii far from the tourist track, providing revealing glimpses of the island’s divisive racial and class issues as well as the proud heritage of kings and warriors and the legacy of colonialists and missionaries. Her unceremonious dealing with issues like drugs, sex, and abandonment, and her entirely unselfconscious prose allow her stories to wash effortlessly over us like an ocean wave, always leaving behind an unusual shell, a curiously shaped rock something to ponder that is fascinating and true. A single mother’s discovery of a po*rnographic magazine in her thirteen year old son’s room sends her down a spiral of jealousy that ultimately guarantees her loss of him. A white man who is left by his native Hawaiian wife struggles to understand why he and his daughter, abandoned together, feel such deep resentment for each other. A boy who insists on the illusion of his happy family suddenly recognizes his father’s lack of real love and comes to the understanding that certain things are severed and they can’t grow again, the acknowledgment of the waste that comes from loving a place that doesn’t love you back. The stories in House of Thieves are told from varied points of view a father, a child, a young woman, an adolescent boy, and more. Rooted in the circumstances and situations of island people, Hemmings’s sharp and entertaining stories reveal the mundane cycle of small tragedies and victories that make up the lives of ordinary people everywhere.
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