Description

Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world. The Edge of the Alphabet, the third novel by Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s foremost writers of the twentieth century, is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world, published here on the centenary of her birth with a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.

Publisher Review

‘[Frame] is endowed with a poet’s imagination, and her prose has beauty, precision, a surging momentum, and the quality of constant surprise.’

– The Atlantic ‘[Frame] meditates upon the disrelation between inner and outer landscapes, mental and physical colors, cruelty and the withdrawal from cruelty, the experience of chaos, of inexplicable evils, of broken perceptions.’

– New York Times ‘She has shown, so quietly, a mastery of the English language which dazzles one beyond ordinary praise.’

– Naomi Mitchison ‘Everything she presents is illuminated and thrown into sharp focus by the limpid clarity of a highly individual vision; she can be detached and passionate at the same time.’

– Fleur Adcock ‘One of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century … A journey from luminous childhood, through the dark experiences of supposed madness, to the renewal of her life through writing fiction. It is a heroic story, and told with such engaging tone, humorous perspective and imaginative power.’

– Michael Holroyd, Sunday Times (praise for An Angel at My Table)