Janet Frame A State of Siege review and information of the content of the 1966 novel by the New Zealand author. Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish the reissue novel of the novel by the New Zealand writer Janet Fram, on November 6, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Janet Frame A State of Siege review

• “Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.” (Hilary Mantel)
• “Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob … Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.” (Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement)
• “Frame’s writing … frequently returns to the strange, self-doubling rituals of normalcy, required of us to find so-called connection…. Her sentences, always at the shore of some great nothingness, have the intricacies and echoes of a conch shell…. Frame points us away from the sturdy book in our hands, toward the flimsy, the abandoned, the scrapped and scraped, the reflective, the ribboned. Toward stories that are nothing but a title, and masterpieces that can fit in the interior pocket of a handbag. There, she says, look. You almost missed it. Look what she has made.” (Audrey Wollen, The New Yorker)

A State of Siege

• Author: Janet Frame (New Zealan)
• Book type: New Zealand novel from 1966
• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Released: November 6, 2025
• Length: 256 pages
• Format: paperback / ebook
• Prize: £ 14.99
• Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the 1966 novel by Janet Frame the New Zealand writer

In A State of Siege, Janet Frame brings her signature playfulness to paint a thrilling psychological portrait. After the death of her invalid mother, Malfred Signal, a retired New Zealand art teacher, leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door.

Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerizing exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live.

Janet Frame was born August 28, 1924 in Dunedin, New Zealand. She was a celebrated New Zealand author of novels, short stories, poetry and the three-volume autobiography An Angel at My Table that was adapted for cinema by Jane Campion. Janet Frame won numerous local and international literary prizes including the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. She was an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held two honorary doctorates. She was awarded a CBE in 1983 and in 1990 she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country’s highest civil honour. Her work is in print around the world and has been translated into many languages. She died on January 29, 2004 at the age of 79 in Duendin.

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