The Lagoon

‘Janet Frame is the greatest New Zealand writer. She is utterly herself. Any one of her books could be published today and it would be ground-breaking‘ ELEANOR CATTON The twenty-four stories in this moving and enlightening collection were written in the late 1940s. At the time of first publication in New Zealand in 1951, Janet Frame was a resident in a psychiatric hospital, having been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. When the book went on to win the Hubert Church Award, it was decided that she should be spared a threatened lobotomy - as she says in her autobiography, ‘My writing saved me‘. Frame‘s first collection and published work, this is the perfect introduction to New Zealand‘s most famous and influential writer, winner of the Commonwealth Prize and internationally acclaimed for her autobiographical trilogy, collected as An Angel at my Table. ‘All my preoccupations as a writer - my notions of home, beauty, madness of sorts and longing - come from her‘ MEG MASON