First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.

Self-styled writer Grace Cleave has writers block, and her anxiety is only augmented by her chronic aversion to leaving her home, to be ''among people, even for five or ten minutes.'' And so it is with trepidation that she accepts an invitation to spend a weekend away from London in the north of England. Once there, she feels more and more like a migratory bird, as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life away from it seem transitory. Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all. From the author of An Angel at My Table comes an exquisitely written novel of exile and return, homesickness and belonging. Written in 1963 when Janet Frame was living in London, this is of a novel she considered too personal to be published while she was alive.

The autobiography of New Zealand's most significant writer New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self–discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive. This book contains selections from the long out–of–print collection entitled Janet Frame: An Autobiography (George Brazillier, 1991), which itself was originally published in three volumes: To the Is–land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City.

'Frame . . . is a master . . . All [stories] overflow with dazzling observation and unforgettable metaphor . . . A powerful collection.' —Kirkus 'This is a gem of a book, or rather a string of gems, each uniquely coloured, cut and crafted.' —Landfall This brand new collection of 28 short stories by Janet Frame spans the length of her career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories has been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Gorse is Not People. The title story caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953. In these stories readers will recognise familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.

Devonport is the first in THE SIGNALMAN'S HOUSE Series in which The Holloway Press, in association with the University of Auckland and the Michael King Centre, plans to publish a work by each of the annual fellows who occupy the Signalman's House on Mount Victoria in Devonport, the home of the Michael King Centre. Devonport: A Diary (which is accompanied by Esplanade, a brief related fiction) is a lively, thoughtful and idiosyncratic collocation of observations on landscape and culture, reflections on writing and a spirited record of daily living in a rich marine, domestic and urban environment new to the returning New Zealander.