A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888-1903

How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a ‘ravishing, immersing read’, A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska, himself raised in Karori, retraces Mansfield’s old ground: the sights, sounds and smells of the rickety colonial capital, as experienced by the budding writer. Along the way his encounters and dogged research - into her Beauchamp ancestry, the social landscape, the festering, deadly surroundings - lead him (and us) to reevaluate long-held conclusions about the writer’s shaping years. They also lead to a thrilling discovery. This haunting and beautifully vivid book combines fact and fiction, biography and memoir, as Yska rediscovers Mansfield’s Wellington, unearthing her childhood as he goes, shining a new lamp on old territory.