She was the 1990 recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, one of New Zealand's foremost literary awards.
[5] Journalist Pauline Willis, reviewing the novel for The Guardian, commented that it was an "auspicious start for a young New Zealand novelist, following in the tradition of Janet Frame", and observed that it was interesting that a young women should "choose to explore an older woman's problems".
[6] The Press noted that "rarely are first novels so well shaped, with language, imagery and incident all contributing to the overall form of the book".
[8] This book is described by the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as " a powerful and darkly bizarre account of an Auckland businessman whose yuppie life is transformed by an apparently prophetic vision of Auckland destroyed by nuclear holocaust".
[2] In 1990, Greenwood spent time working on a novel in Menton, France as the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, which she intended to be a historical novel about women in religious life set in medieval times.