Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world.

The Edge of the Alphabet, the third novel by Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s foremost writers of the twentieth century, is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world, published here on the centenary of her birth with a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.