When Geoffrey Moorhouse and his wife invited the New Zealand writer Janet Frame to stay, they changed the course of her life. Forty-five years on, her fictional account of that weekend is finally being published.

Geoffrey Moorhouse writing on Saturday July 5, 2008, in The Guardian

When I met Janet Frame, she was, with two books under her belt, regarded as New Zealand's most promising writer since Katherine Mansfield. Born into a working-class family in the small South Island town of Oamaru, she had been committed to a notorious lunatic asylum (that's what they still called them in those post-war years) on the sea cliffs outside Dunedin at the age of 21, diagnosed as a chronic schizophrenic. She was to become familiar with mental institutions, on and off, for most of the next decade, only narrowly escaping a leucotomy (to which her mother had assented) because the New Zealand branch of PEN presented her with an award for The Lagoon and Other Stories, which impressed the doctors enough to reappraise her status.

In 1956 she fled to England to escape from a past that had always been unhappy and
sometimes terrifying. It was here, six years later, that we met; but not
until 2000, when Michael King's fine biography appeared, did I learn that
our encounter changed the subsequent course of Frame's life. The posthumous
novel Towards Another Summer, which is just being published here, is her
story of how that happened.

To read Moorhouse's full, fascinating story link here toThe Guardian online.

Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame, published this week by Virago (£12.99) in the U.K. and earlier by Random House in both New Zealand & Australia. U.S. edition to follow.