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.
This novel won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ansett New Zealand Book Award. It was Janet Frame's last novel.
Janet Frame
Janet Paterson Frame, ONZ, CBE (1924–2004) was a New Zealand author. She wrote eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, an edition of juvenile fiction, and three volumes of autobiography during her lifetime. Since her death, a twelfth novel, a second volume of poetry, and a handful of short stories have been released. Frame's celebrity is informed by her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was canceled when, just days before the procedure, her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize. These dramatic personal experiences feature prominently in Frame's autobiographical trilogy and director Jane Campion's popular film adaptation of the texts, with recognisably autobiographical elements further resurfacing in many of her fictional publications. Characterised by scholar Simone Oettli as a writer who simultaneously sought fame and anonymity, Frame eschewed the dominant New Zealand literary realism of the post-war era, combining prose, poetry, and modernist elements with a magical realist style, garnering numerous local literary prizes despite mixed critical and public reception.