Come on Shore and We Will Kill You and Eat You All: An Unlikely Love Story - Hardcover

'Christina Thompson defines a contact encounter as "what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time." This unusual, unclassifiable, unfailingly interesting book is a contact encounter. Few readers will forget their first meeting with the author, with her Maori husband, and with the historical context that swirls around them. Thompson writes beautifully, and, even more remarkably, she surprises us on every page' Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down 'A charming blend of travel writing, cultural history, anthropology and memoir, this intriguing book honours the nineteenth-century explorers' narratives that are its inspiration' Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal 'Her prose never disappoints' Publishers Weekly

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and Maoris, told partly as a history of the complex and violent period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's unlikely marriage to a Maori man. Beginning with Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and Cook's circumnavigation of 1770, Thompson explores the legacy of cultural displacement over centuries: the fascination, the friction and the bloody encounters that have left indelible scars on the consciousness of New Zealand. In turn, she finds the clash of cultures winds its way into her own life as she falls in love with a Maori known as 'Seven'. Transporting us back and forth in time and around the world, from Australia to Hawaii and from tribal New Zealand to a settled home in New England, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All brings to life a lush variety of characters and settings. A blend of history, memoir, anthropology and romance, it probes the footprints of the past and the future it leads to.