"The Love School collects more than twenty years' of Elizabeth Knox's non-fiction. These frank and revealing essays and talks tell the story of her writing s beginnings in childhood imaginary games played with her sisters and friends; of leaving home and working at Inland Revenue to earn money to write; of the writing and putting away of the two novels that came before her prize-winning debut, After Z-Hour, in 1987; and of the extraordinary novels which followed. Here is Wellington in the eighties: lives led in now demolished buildings, the pastimes and politics of the period described with vivid particularity, passion, wisdom and a sense of the absurd. " "In these pages the reader will encounter the comic: possums who invade and occupy a portion of the author's Brooklyn flat; the dramatic: the Red Squad at the intersection of Rintoul and Riddiford Streets on Wellington test day; and the mysterious: an angelic stranger in a Venetian back street. "--Jacket.