Author(s): Janet Frame

NZ Fiction

Hailed by one reviewer as 'likely a work of genius', Scented Gardens For The Blind (first published in 1963) ostensibly follows the members of the fractured Glace family, suffering from different forms of sensory deprivation - the daughter mute, the mother blind, the father estranged - yet each living in a vivid world of their own making.
While the father looks to the past in his obsessions with genealogy and toy soldiers, the modern age hangs over them with the hint of nuclear apocalypse. But all is not what it seems in this dark and dazzling novel, and Janet Frame's narrative virtuosity is expressed in an ending that makes the reader re-interpret all that has gone before.
Modernisation, in the form of electricity and the Overspill from London, confronts the inhabitants of the small English village of Little Burgelstatham in the richly textured The Adaptable Man (first published in 1965). While some amongst the large cast of characters prefer to live in the past and avoid modern life, others adapt and welcome its arrival, not least Muriel Baldry, who can now hang her Venini chandelier and throw a dinner party to celebrate.
Scented Gardens for the Blind first published 1963; The Adaptable Man 1965. The omnibus edition 2007.