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The Beaded Curtain
Brief Description
Part autobiography, part memoir, part quest, lauded writer Lloyd Jones’s The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness. The text gets about from Jones’s Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing clothes from Hiroshima...
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The Beaded Curtain
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Arresting interconnected essays by New Zealand's most distinguished writer
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Description
Part autobiography, part memoir, part quest, lauded writer Lloyd Jones’s The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness.
The text gets about from Jones’s Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing clothes from Hiroshima and his encounters with the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. From the hills of the Wairarapa to Hiroshima and Waiheke Island, he looks at examples of mavericks, in his own family and in those of poets and conscientious objectors.
He is, throughout, daringly innovative, the text folding one event inside another. With language so precise and at times so coruscating that it may have been cut from stone, and with a candour and humanity that draws the reader deep into Jones’s preoccupations and memories, The Beaded Curtain challenges, rails and mourns as he grapples with the past. Elegant and searing, tender and angry, it holds the reader in its steady, accomplished, clear-eyed grip.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781991309402
Publisher: Massey University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 22 October 2026
Country: New Zealand
Imprint: Massey University Press
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 20.0mm
Width: 138.0mm
Height: 210.0mm
Weight: 200g
Pages: 272
About the Author
Lloyd Jones is a New Zealand-based writer. He has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature. He is also an arts laureate of New Zealand, and recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University. His writing has been translated into many languages. His novel Mister Pip won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and his novel Hand Me Down World was shortlisted for the Berlin International Literary Prize.
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