Wrestling with the angel - Michael King

Janet Frame achieved fame through her poignant and beautifully written autobiographical series, An Angel at my Table. New Zealand's most celebrated yet most reclusive author, her early life makes harrowing reading: a series of family tragedies culminated in her being committed to mental hospitals for almost a decade.

She finally escaped from this abyss of despair, regaining control of her life and becoming one of the great writers of her time. With unprecedented access to Frame's personal papers and to the woman herself, Michael King has fashioned a vivid and sympathetic biography of an extraordinary character.

'Elegantly written . . . In King's account, our extended tea party with Frame draws her out as something of an authorial Our Man in Havana, abducted into a plot so wild and extraordinary it constantly resembles fiction' Observer

'This is an admirable work of scholarship . . . Frame's gift of writerly insight is presented as both joyful and difficult, nurtured in the privacy to which she clung throughout the course of what makes for an absorbing life-story' Spectator