A State of Siege

In A State of Siege, Janet Frame brings her signature playfulness to paint a thrilling psychological portrait. After the death of her invalid mother, Malfred Signal, a retired New Zealand art teacher, leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerizing exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live.

About the Author :
Janet Frame (1924-2004) was a celebrated New Zealand author of novels, short stories, poetry and the three-volume autobiography An Angel at My Table that was adapted for cinema by Jane Campion. Janet Frame won numerous local and international literary prizes including the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. She was an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held two honorary doctorates. She was awarded a CBE in 1983 and in 1990 she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest civil honour. Her work is in print around the world and has been translated into many languages.

Review :
‘Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.’‘ — Hilary Mantel ‘She is a singular writer. No one is quite like her.’ — Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries ‘Janet Frame is a revelation, a genius, who also feels like a long lost friend, an intimate hero. A State of Siege hits you like lightning, it is a painterly masterpiece which makes you see the world anew. Nowhere else have I read such a vivid description of a woman alone in our strange and unforgiving universe. Everyone must read her.’ — Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise ‘Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.’ — Jane Campion, Guardian ‘Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic – full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard.’ — John Self, The Times (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet) ‘Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob…. Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.’ — Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet) ‘The most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.’ — Catherine Taylor, Guardian (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet) ‘A revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.’ — Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet) ‘Frame’s writing … frequently returns to the strange, self-doubling rituals of normalcy, required of us to find so-called connection.... Her sentences, always at the shore of some great nothingness, have the intricacies and echoes of a conch shell…. Frame points us away from the sturdy book in our hands, toward the flimsy, the abandoned, the scrapped and scraped, the reflective, the ribboned. Toward stories that are nothing but a title, and masterpieces that can fit in the interior pocket of a handbag. There, she says, look. You almost missed it. Look what she has made.’ — Audrey Wollen, New Yorker (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet) ‘Frame’s writing is often compared to Faulkner’s, and her family history reads like a Southern Gothic novel. Yet Frame can be an extraordinarily cheerful, funny writer. Language was a source of continual revelation… The Edge of the Alphabet is about trash, debris, dreams, the incommunicable and the excluded.… The proposition Frame seems to be making is that marginality means semantic exile too; vivid, broken images are her characters’ alternative vehicles for communication.’ — Lucie Elven, London Review of Books (praise for The Edge of the Alphabet)