Janet Frame has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Owls Do Cry.
In the Memorial Room
Summary
In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship - a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable - it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry. Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Menton, France, as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow. It is a wonderful social satire, a send-up of the cult of the dead author, and - in the best tradition of Frame - a fascinating exploration of the complexity and the beauty of language.
©2017 Janet Frame Literary Trust (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Towards Another Summer
Summary
Towards Another Summer is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not knowing where home really is. It is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot through with self-deprecating humour and frailty. Grace, the protagonist, is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory. The desire to leave behind the social human agonies of appearing neither too clever nor too stupid, too helpful or too lazy, becomes overwhelming for Grace. Frame's observational prowess is apparent in Towards Another Summer in the vivid and heartbreaking passages about children and childhood and in Grace's growing awareness of the demanding forces of social convention.
©2008 Janet Frame (P)2008 Bolinda Publishing
Owls Do Cry
Summary
Owls Do Cry is one of the classics of New Zealand literature, and has remained in print continuously for 50 years. A fiftieth anniversary edition was published in 2007. Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: "Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters" Regarded by many as one of the best New Zealand novels published, Owls Do Cry forms a loose trilogy with her two subsequent novels, Faces in the Water and The Edge of the Alphabet.
©2008 Janet Frame (P)2008 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.