Towards Another Summer - Janet Frame

Written by Janet Frame
Read by Heather Bolton
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

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.” 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.

Janet Frame wrote Towards Another Summer in 1963, but she believed it too personal to be published while she was alive. Finally published in 2007, the novel is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not knowing where home really is. It is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot through with self-deprecating humour and frailty.