In The Carpathians, Janet Frame again calls into question the human facility to communicate. Relocated New Yorker Mattina Brecon attempts to get to know her neighbors on Kowhai Street, where she has taken up temporary residence in order to research the Memory Flower for which her new town is famous. One night she awakens to find her neighbors screaming without human language, covered by a midnight rain of glittering specks that are the ashes of language. The townspeople mysteriously disappear, leaving Mattina alone. Her own memories and the frightening novel of a stranger that tells the story of Mattina herself are all that she has to trace the mystery.
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