'One of the greatest autobiographies written this century. MICHAEL HOLROYD Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here in a single edition and complemented by previously unpublished photographs. From a childhood and adolescnece spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family, through its life as a student and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry of the saving world of writers and the 'Mirror City' that sustains them, what we are given is not just a record of the events of a life. Janet Frame accomplishes ' the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors'. Two volumes of the autobiography - To the Is-Land (1983) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985) - won the prestigious Wattie Book of the Year Award, and the other volume, An Angel at my Table, was awarded the Non-fiction prize of the New Zealand Book Awards is 1984.