The Edge of the Alphabet

Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world. The Edge of the Alphabet, the third novel by Janet Frame, one of New Zealand-s foremost writers of the twentieth century, is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world, published on the centenary of her birth with a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.