The Love School: personal essays - Elizabeth Knox

The Love School collects more than twenty years of Elizabeth Knox’s non-fiction. These frank and revealing essays and talks tell the story of her writing's beginnings in childhood imaginary games played with her sisters and friends; of leaving home and working at Inland Revenue to earn money to write; of the writing and putting away of the two novels that came before her prize-winning debut, After Z-Hour, in 1987; and of the extraordinary novels which followed. Here is Wellington in the eighties: lives led in now demolished buildings, the pastimes and politics of the period described with vivid particularity, passion, wisdom and a sense of the absurd.

In these pages the reader will encounter the comic: possums who invade and occupy a portion of the author's Brooklyn flat; the dramatic: the Red Squad at the intersection of Rintoul and Riddiford Streets on Wellington test day; and the mysterious: an angelic stranger in a Venetian back street.

Named one of the NZ Listener's Best Books of 2008

'an appealing, sure-footed collection of essays. Knox moves from doubts about her chosen field to frank delight at her success, you understand that this is someone who says what she thinks, and enjoys it.' —Jolisa Gracewood, NZ Listener

Victoria University Press, 2008. Trade paperback, 368 pages. 

Condition: secondhand paperback in very good condition.