When Chase is found murdered, ‘half submerged in a swamp’, Kaya becomes the sheriff’s main suspect. As she grows up, Kaya begins to long for companionship and love and befriends two local boys: steady Tate, who teaches her to read, and handsome womaniser Chase Andrews. Rather like Manon, in Pagnol’s Manon des Sources, the local villagers are suspicious of her and spitefully nickname her ‘swamp rat’. Owens explores the natural world, which she obviously knows intimately – ‘lush, rounded forests’, ‘briny marsh’, ‘undulating grasses’ and ‘oak lagoons’ – through the eyes of a sensitive child.Ībandoned by her parents and her siblings when she was six, resourceful Kaya has survived for years, alone in the marsh, observing nature and foraging for food, befriending ‘herons’, ‘gulls’ and ‘fireflies’. Set in the desolate marshlands off the North Carolina coast, this lyrically written, subtle and heartfelt book is at once a murder mystery, a romance and a haunting coming-of-age story. WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens (Corsair, £14.99)
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