‘Janet Frame was a unique and troubled soul whose luminous words are the more precious’ HILARY MANTEL
‘Her dark, eloquent song captured my heart ‘ JANE CAMPION
‘All my preoccupations as a writer – my notions of home, beauty, madness of sorts and longing – come from her’ MEG MASON
So the day promised fair, and the sea lay like a quilt with the waves tucked under, and the trees wavering like leafless water, cut to fit from a transparent block of blue air and frost.
Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family: Francie, who is twelve and about to start work at the woollen mills, hard drudgery sweetened with the thrill of riding a bike to work; Toby, who would rather play at the dump than go to school, where the dark velvet cloak of epilepsy often wraps itself around him; Chicks, the youngest; and Daphne, whose rich poetic way of seeing the world leads to a heartbreaking life in institutions.
Written with lyrical beauty and a deep sensitivity in its depiction of hardship and tragedy, Owls Do Cry is a poetic masterpiece and regarded as one of the best New Zealand novels ever published.
INTRODUCED BY MARGARET DRABBLE
‘The first great New Zealand novel and a modernist masterpiece . . . the book’s immense power to unnerve, astonish and impress endures’ Guardian
‘Her dark, eloquent song captured my heart ‘ JANE CAMPION
‘All my preoccupations as a writer – my notions of home, beauty, madness of sorts and longing – come from her’ MEG MASON
So the day promised fair, and the sea lay like a quilt with the waves tucked under, and the trees wavering like leafless water, cut to fit from a transparent block of blue air and frost.
Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family: Francie, who is twelve and about to start work at the woollen mills, hard drudgery sweetened with the thrill of riding a bike to work; Toby, who would rather play at the dump than go to school, where the dark velvet cloak of epilepsy often wraps itself around him; Chicks, the youngest; and Daphne, whose rich poetic way of seeing the world leads to a heartbreaking life in institutions.
Written with lyrical beauty and a deep sensitivity in its depiction of hardship and tragedy, Owls Do Cry is a poetic masterpiece and regarded as one of the best New Zealand novels ever published.
INTRODUCED BY MARGARET DRABBLE
‘The first great New Zealand novel and a modernist masterpiece . . . the book’s immense power to unnerve, astonish and impress endures’ Guardian
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Reviews
Owls Do Cry remains innovative and relevant; Frame's idiosyncratic and startlingly visual style means that the book's immense power to unnerve, astonish and impress endures
Frame's tormented personal story was reflected in much of her fiction, which centered on the inadequacy of language to convey emotions
Janet Frame's first novel, Owls Do Cry, created a sensation in New Zealand when it was published in 1957 . . . Her dark, eloquent song captured my heart . . . Frame gave Daphne this inner world of gorgeously imagined riches, but also affirmed it in me, and in countless other sensitive teenage girls: we had been given a voice - poetic, powerful and fated.
Janet Frame was a unique and troubled soul whose luminous words are the more precious because they were snatched from the jaws of the disaster of her early life
Owls Do Cry is a devastating reflection on the character of conventional society and the dangers that await those who reject its narrowness - and as such, is profoundly chilling. It is also a vivid social document, capturing the language and texture of the postwar period
This is the era that saw the emergence of novelists including Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, and Frame's place alongside them would be assured if she never published anything but this one novel
