A landmark of modernist fiction, Owls Do Cry traces one family's unraveling in post-war New Zealand after their daughter is institutionalizedFirst published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing...

From the author of the universally acclaimed An Angel at My Table, this is an exquisitely written novel of exile and return, homesickness and belonging"Self–styled" writer Grace Cleave has writer's block, and her anxiety is only augmented by her chronic aversion to leaving her home, to be "among people, even for five or ten minutes." And so it is with trepidation that she accepts an invitation to spend a weekend away from London in the north of England. On...

This brand new collection of 28 short stories spans the length of Frame's career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories have been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Between My Father and the King.The piece 'Gorse is Not People' caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained ...

In 1951, just days before her scheduled lobotomy after years in a mental hospital, New Zealand author Janet Frame's first collection of short stories unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, one of the country's most prestigious honors. The procedure was cancelled, and Frame would go on to become one of the seminal authors of contemporary New Zealand literature.During her time at the MacDowell artist's colony in New Hampshire, Frame met painter William Theophilus Brown, a...

Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress–Armstrong Fellowship—a living memorial' to the poet, Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable—it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry.Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Me...

The autobiography of New Zealand's most significant writerNew Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving ...

Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.' Regarded by many as one of the best New Zealand novels published, Owls Do Cry forms a loose trilogy with her two subsequent novels, Faces ...

Grace, the protagonist, is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory. The desire to leave behind the social human agonies of appearing neither too clever nor too stupid, too helpful or too lazy, becomes overwhelming for Grace. Frame's observational prowess is apparent in Towards Another Summer in the vivid and hear...

Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship – a 'living memorial' to the poet, Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable – it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry. Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Mento...

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic ...

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes—charged with the brutal murder of her former master and sent to await execution on an isolated farm.Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at ...

The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems ...**"A true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly." —**New York Times Book ReviewIt is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. O...