To the Is-Land: An Autobiography (Paladin Books) - Softcover

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Janet Frame is New Zealand’s most famous writer. A winner of the Commonwealth Prize for her fiction, she is also internationally acclaimed for her autobiographical trilogy, recently filmed under the title ‘An Angel at My Table’. ‘The Lagoon’ is her first published work.

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Award-winning New Zealand novelist Janet Frame is equally acclaimed for her autobiographical trilogy in which she chronicles her descent into madness and eventual salvation as a writer. In this first volume she tells the story of her childhood and youth in the 1930s, one of five children of an impoverished railwayman and a mother whose aspirations to write poetry first planted the seeds of literary creativity in Janet Frame's imagination.

Also available in Flamingo: 'An Angel at My Table (Autobiography 2), The Envoy from Mirror City (Autobiography 3)'

'Exemplary autobiography. My only complaint is that the book ran out before my enthusiasm: a rare experience.'
LITERARY REVIEW

'A wonderfully evocative account of her childhood. Janet Frame's autobiography, like her fiction, bears witness to those hours and years, to her tenacity as well as her talent.'
GUARDIAN

'Janet Frame's childhood landmarks were more dramatic than most but what is different about this description of childhood is the way in which her emerging identity fed on the scraps and tags of fairy tales and verse. She manages to invoke past innocence, and show how stories, legends and poetic images were for her the magic keys to understanding and expression.'
TLS

''To the Is-Land' is an evocative and clear-sighted account of growing up in small-town New Zealand. A writer of originality and power, Janet Frame is skilled at describing the almost tactile presence of words for the child and adolescent; the physical shock when she encounters her dead sister Myrtle's name hidden in the opening line of 'Lycidas', the violent effect of an obscenity at the family dinner table.'
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS