The Carpathians

What happens when the town of Puamahara begins to profit from its legend and the astronomers discovering the Gravity Star predict an unthinkable future? Mattina Brecon, a New Yorker, arrives in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, where her painstaking study of her neighbours is interrupted by a new kind of cataclysmic event. Mattina finds herself in possession of a Kowhai Street that is without people, language or memory.

The sly play of fictions within fictions is a tour de force of narrative, making it a deserved winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ansett New Zealand Book Award. It was Janet Frame's last novel.