Here, Janet Frame explores the Maniototo, that 'bloody plain' of the imagination which crouches beneath the world. Violent Pansy Proudlock, ventriloquist, also known as Alice Thumb, gossip, and as Mavis Furness Barwell Halleton, is the reader's guide.

'The Daylight and the Dust' is a comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's short stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection 'The Lagoon and Other Stories', right up to 'You Are Now Entering the Human Heart'.

This autobiography traces Janet Frame's childhood in a poor but intellectually intense family, life as a student, years of incarceration in mental hospitals and eventual entry into the saving world of writers.

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.