"The Word Burners is a strong and philosophic tale of life and death and the search for meaning in women’s lives." Elizabeth Smyth, Canterbury University Review.

‘The Word Burners provokes readers to explore their own relationship with the two book’s main themes – language and feminism… the words Beryl Fletcher uses are well chosen and often provocative." Rebekah Palmer, NZ Books

"Fletcher’s writing has a stringency and immediacy that makes The Word Burners both an excellent read and a neatly-crafted novel of ideas." Kathryn Rountree, Dominion Sunday Times

"The characters… including Sally and her obsessions, are well placed and delineated and the novel is well constructed and moves at a good pace…" W.J.McEldowney, Otago Daily Times

"This is the first New Zealand novel that’s about how hard it is to be a female academic, and how much harder it is to be a feminist academic… Having said this, I must add that it’s not dense or opaque: it has lots of melodrama, sexy scenes, drunken quarrels, deaths and so on - and it has got all the hooks that make for a good read and make you desperate to know how it’s going to end." Aorewa McLeod, NZ Listener

"If you’d like to see how ideology can drive a well-paced narrative, or simply want a good intelligent read, The Word Burners is for you." Barbara Neale, The Evening Post

"Beryl Fletcher demonstrates a large talent for metaphor, theme, character and descriptions which border on the lyrical…" Ruth Hogg, The Dominion

"The name is exciting and so is the book. Figuratively, the characters burn old words, old concepts and old expectations for women… With sureness and sensitivity Beryl Fletcher succeeds in making the ‘unspeakable speakable’." Liz Forest, Chaff

About the author:
Beryl Fletcher was born in New Zealand. In 1992, her novel The Word Burners was awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the best first book in South Asia and the South Pacific. She has published three other novels, The Iron Mouth, The Silicon Tongue.and The Bloodwood Clan. 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.