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,
New 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
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.”
Welcome to the comical, ironical, and multiple worlds of one Violet Pansy Proudlock (a ventriloquist), who is also known as Alice Thumb (a gossip and secret sharer of limited imaginings) and, at othe
Beneath the seemingly tranquil surface of an old English village lie murder, incest, and mystery. Alwyn Maude, a handsome young man, commits murder for no particular reason other than to kill. The sen
Owls Do Cry is the story of the Withers family: Francie, soon to leave school to start work at the woollen mills; Toby, whose days are marred by the velvet cloak of epilepsy; Chicks, the baby of the f
Vera, a fifty-year-old mental institution inmate refuses to speak and lives in an imaginary world, whose inhabitants, the Glace family, also refuse to communicate
First 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 cata
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 tha
