Bone Talk

by Candy Gourlay

Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay is an adventure story, aimed at the tween age group (10+), and set in a remote village in the highlands of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. The hero, Samkad, belongs to a tribe of headhunters, whose world is about to be overturned by the arrival of the Americans. Bone Talk was shortlisted for the 2018 Costa Book Awards.

The book, according to the author

“So yeah, my characters are a headhunting people. Fact. But would this be off-putting to my readers?

Worse, would it be offensive to the people of the Cordillera themselves who, during my research trips, gave me the impression that they wanted to put headhunting firmly into the distant past.

Whenever I tried to ask anyone about headhunting in the Cordillera, I was gently reminded that headhunting had been outlawed back in the American occupation. When I visited the Bontoc Museum in search of headhunting artifacts, I found them displayed in the bottom shelf of a glass cabinet in a remote corner of the museum.”

Candy Gourlay on her website, August 02, 2018