Ordinary People Like Us

'And here I was thinking we were just ordinary people.'

From the landscapes of the Far North, through inner-city Auckland and to London in the 1970s and 90s, Ordinary People Like Us follows five generations of Māori women through a century of profound social and cultural change.

Bird. Kaa. Annie. Lorna. Jen. Pax.
Where should we start?
What is there to know?

Some fall in love easily, while others wait half a lifetime for their person. One walks a thin line between the land of the living and the call of the void. Some listen to the ghosts of the past, and each forges their unique way in the world. Gifted with an otherworldly instinct, in their most ordinary lives, they are all extraordinary.

Expansive and intimate, exploring the bonds that endure through generations, this is a celebration of family and a powerful reminder that no matter how far we travel, it is the people who love us that keep us whole.

Kelly Ana Morey of Ngāti Kūrī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri and Pākehā descent, was a critically acclaimed writer of novels, short stories, poems, essays and non-fiction.



She gained a BA in English and a MA specialising in contemporary Māori art, followed by a MALit, and was a graduate of the University of Auckland creative writing class. She also worked towards a PhD on the use of museum collections in contemporary New Zealand art.
Bloom, her debut novel, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. She went on to produce four more novels: Grace is Gone; On an Island, with Consequences Dire; Quinine; and Daylight Second.


In 2003 she was the recipient of the Todd Young Writers' Bursary. She was awarded the inaugural NZSA Janet Frame Literary Award in 2025. She made use of the Māori Writer's Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre in 2014 to write Daylight Second and the 2023 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship to work on a sixth novel, Ordinary People Like Us.



As the oral historian for the RNZN Museum, Morey wrote Service to the Sea, a history of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Other non-fiction publications were How to Read a Book and St Cuthbert's College: 100 Years. She also wrote criticism - art and literary - and features, reviews and essays for newspapers and magazines.
Morey spent her final years on a rural property in Kaiwaka, Northland, where she maintained a soft spot for Jack Russell terriers, Italian greyhounds, other people's writing, the New Zealand thoroughbred, star gazing and the various ghosts and characters she carted around in the bottomless kete of her imagination.