Towards Another Summer

Suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot through with self-deprecating humour and frailty.

Suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot through with self-deprecating humour and frailty.

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.

Towards Another Summer is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not knowing where home really is.

Frame’s observational prowess is here in the vivid, heartbreaking passages about children and childhood, in Grace’s growing awareness of the deep-rooted nuances of social convention, and the very honest illumination of just how demanding and exhausting it can be to try to fulfill the expectations of others.

Janet Frame wrote this small and exquisite novel in 1963 while taking a break from her longest novel, The Adaptable Man. It is a precursor to An Angel at My Table, the autobiography Janet Frame wrote 20 years later (inspiring Jane Campion’s memorable film adaptation). It’s a highly personal work that she did not want published until after her death.