Owls Do Cry

Owls do Cry by Janet Frame

The silent force of flowing water. Beautiful objects viewed behind glass. Intimations of joy and pain from an artist’s soul.

This stunningly beautiful first novel gently turns over the extraordinary hours and days of a less-than-ordinary family from a small town in New Zealand. Marred by a childhood tragedy, the stories of the lives of four siblings unfold around the fraught journey of the middle sister, Daphne – diagnosed schizophrenic, creative, emotional – through mental institutions and treatment into adulthood.

Told in gorgeous stream of consciousness with hallucinatory lyricism, the book draws from Frame’s own difficult family situation as a child, and from her experiences of eight years spent as an adolescent and young adult in New Zealand’s asylums.

Film Biography directed by Jane Campion

Resources

 

This entry was posted in contemporary literature, fiction, novels and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply