*Sometimes, Grace thought, "no thank you" was the most chilling phrase in the English language.* Janet Frame wrote this small and exquisite novel in 1963 whilst taking a break from her longest novel, The Adaptable Man. It's a highly personal work that she did not want published until after her death. *Towards Another Summer* is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not remembering where home is. The novel is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot-through with self-deprecating humour and knowingness, and frailty. All of Frame's observational prowess is here in the vivid, heartbreaking passages about children and childhood and in Grace, the protagonist s, growing awareness of the deep-rooted forces of social convention and how demanding and exhausting it can be to try and fulfil the expectations of others. Grace is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory. The desire to allow herself to become a bird and leave behind the social human agonies of appearing neither too clever nor too stupid, too helpful or too lazy, becomes overwhelming. A beautiful novel that demands reading, and re-reading. Staff review Towards Another Summer is an intensely autobiographical novel which Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most famous author (after perhaps Mansfield) wrote in 1963 while taking a break from another novel, and only allowed to be published after her death (Frame passed away in 2004). It is the delightful tale of successful young Kiwi author Grace Cleave and her travails whilst resident in the UK: trying to come to terms not just with the bleak landscapes and bitter cold of the Northern winter, but also the weight of expectation – for this most private and socially awkward of individuals – as a minor celebrity from a farflung land. An invitation to spend a weekend with a well-meaning family makes Grace wonder if she’s up to any sort of social interaction whatsoever. Memories of her childhood come flooding in, and she decides her real identity is not human, but rather that of a migratory bird, for whom “home” is a state of mind as much as a yearned-for place … Delicate, funny, poignant, wise – this is the Janet Frame New Zealanders, and all lovers of literature, revere! Martin Shaw, a New Zealand èmigrè, works at Readings Carlton