The Word Burners
How do you decide to live? Or do others make that decision for you? In this lyrical novel, Beryl Fletcher explores the paradoxes of modern life. As a new academic, Julia finds her beliefs challenged by her students, reinforced by her friend’s mistreatment and dismissed by her family. Just as her mother sought freedom from her family’s rural poverty, Julia and her sister Isobel, search for their own solace finding it in different and disparate places.
2002 | ISBN 9781876756239 | Paperback | 200 x 132 mm | 312 pp
Reviews
'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
'[A] novel about how hard it is to be a female academic, and how much harder it is to be a feminist academic. I must add 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
‘In The Word Burners, Beryl Fletcher writes ordinary people with extraordinary style, revealing sisterhood in all its incarnations – blood, friendship, family, love – with pinpoint accuracy for the pain and a poignant hope for the possible.’
–Stella Duffy