Piercing Revelation

Janet Frame’s 1963 novel, Towards Another Summer, written in London and first published posthumously in New Zealand in 2007, is considered by Guardian reviewer Rachel Cooke. Towards Another Summer is based on a weekend visit Frame made to the north, to the home of a journalist, his New Zealand wife and their children (the journalist was Geoffrey Moorhouse of the Guardian, who interviewed Frame in 1962). “As an account of what it is like to be an  overly sensitive and lonely single young woman, it is as true and as piercing as anything I have read in a very long time,” writes Cooke. “Strongly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the novel is exciting for  its language. It feels surprisingly right to hold Towards Another Summer. It is a short novel, but a numinous one. This time, the keepers of the flame did the right thing.”