Synopses & Reviews
Self-styled writer Grace Cleave has writers 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. Once there, she feels more and more like a migratory bird, as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life away from it seem transitory. Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all.
From the author of An Angel at My Table comes an exquisitely written novel of exile and return, homesickness and belonging. Written in 1963 when Janet Frame was living in London, this is of a novel she considered too personal to be published while she was alive.
Review
Praise for Janet Frame
In this deeply personal novel of exile and loneliness, Janet Frame proves the master of nostalgia, beauty, and loss. Frame is, and will remain, divine.”
Alice Sebold
"Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploitsor creates on the page, to be absolutely puristic about ither peculiar sensibility, her private window into the universal." The New York Times Book Review
"Frame has been compared with Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. I am more often reminded of Jean Rhys, similarly distanced from her homeland in the West Indies, with an artistic viewpoint that may seem skewed by its own sensitivity but is, in fact, courageously clear-sighted." Telegraph (London)
Synopsis
From the author of "An Angel at My Table" comes an exquisitely written story of exile and return, homesickness, and belonging. Written in 1963, this is the first publication of a novel Frame considered too personal to be published while she was alive.