The Iron Mouth by Beryl Fletcher Price: $24.95 (Australian dollars), n/a (US dollars), n/a (Canadian dollars), $29.95 (NZ dollars), £9.95 (UK pounds) 1993 Top Twenty Title Listener Women's Book Festival

Cover design by Margaret Cochran© Permission to use images should be directed to Spinifex Press.

The Iron Mouth follows the narrator, a film-maker, through the process of writing a script. With a central motif being the story of Helen of Troy and the Trojan war, the lives of the characters (in the novel and the film script) take on new meanings. The novel is set in Auckland, New Zealand and attempts to deconstruct the notion that warfare between male heroes provides the only genuine topic of epic literature.

... the language is a lyrical delight ... One is compelled to read on to find out what is going to happen to these moderns as they play the games people have played for thousands of years. And once the games are played out, the questions still remain.

- Marion Findlay

About the author:
Beryl Fletcher was born in Auckland in 1938. She has had stories published in anthologies and her work has received international recognition. Her first book, The Word Burners, was awarded the 1991 Top Twenty Title from the Listener Women's Book Festival, New Zealand, and the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book Award for South-East Asian and Pacific Region. The Iron Mouth is published by Daphne Brasell Associates Press, Wellington, NZ and in Australia is distributed by Spinifex Press. Beryl Fletcher's second title, The Silicon Tongue, and her most recent, The Bloodwood Clan, are also published by Spinifex Press. In 1994, she was chosen to represent New Zealand at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA. In 1999, she was appointed as Writer in Residence at The University of Waikato, New Zealand. Now sixty, Beryl believes that women who matured Before Feminism have important stories to tell. In Cyberfiction, she tells how one of these stories came to be written.

Also...

Read the abstracts from the Politics of Cyberfeminism Conference at which Beryl Fletcher and other Spinifex authors Renate Klein, Dale Spender, Rye Senjen, Jane Guthrey, Susan Hawthorne and Suniti Namjoshi were speakers, on Saturday 21 September 1996 at Deakin University.

1875559221 fiction 296pp 198x128 Territory: World All rights:Spinifex Press