From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir

Description

Title: From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir
Author: Maurice Shadbolt
Publisher:  David Ling Publishing, Auckland, 1999
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent — As new

Description:

Shadbolt published this in 1999. By then he knew the dementia was coming; by the following year he was in a home in Taumarunui, and in 2004 he died there. From the Edge of the Sky is his last book, the second of two memoirs following One of Ben’s: A New Zealand Medley (1993), and it is an uneven and honest document of a long career coming to a close.

From 1959 to the mid-1990s, Maurice Shadbolt was the most widely read serious novelist New Zealand produced. He won the Wattie Award twice. The NZ Book Award for Fiction. The CBE. An honorary doctorate from Auckland University. Season of the Jew was a bestseller. Strangers and Journeys was placed among contenders for the “Great New Zealand Novel.” He published a story in The New Yorker before Janet Frame. He described his books as “bottled messages tossed out at points along that journey” — and this is the last message, tossed from the edge of the sky.

It is not his finest writing. It is the writing of a man racing the clock and losing, looking back at what he made. That is its own kind of testimony, and the reason it belongs on a shelf where readers who care about NZ literature can find it.

Why We Stock It:

The final work of one of NZ’s most decorated 20th-century writers, written as his mind was beginning to go. Not Shadbolt at his best — but Shadbolt at his most truthful about what a writing life costs, and what it leaves behind.