A man’s obsession with a beautiful woman leads to danger in this psychological thriller by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt. In a small Pennsylvania town, Robert Forrester is recuperating from a nasty divorce and a bout of psychological trouble. One evening, while driving home, he sees a pretty, young woman framed by her bright kitchen window. Soon, he can’t keep himself away. But when Robert is inevitably discovered, obsession is turned on its head, and he finds himself unable to shake the young woman, nor entirely sure whether he should. From Patricia Highsmith, once called “the balladeer of stalking” by The New Yorker, The Cry of the Owl is a modern classic ready to be reborn. Praise for The Cry of the Owl “Kafka with a vengeance.” —The Spectator (London) “Highsmith generates suspense out of a different sort of fear: not the fear of death, which drives most crime-centered entertainment, but the pettier, more intimate dread of humiliation, of being caught on the street with nothing on. . . . There’s something else here, hard to identify, pulling us along relentlessly, as thrillers do—an undertow, a surge of third-rail current.” —The New Yorker “The Cry of the Owl is a deceptively easy stroll toward personal chaos and destruction. It is thoroughly chilling because nothing seems farfetched. Odd, yes, but believable. . . . The Cry of the Owl is creepy and unsettling, a taut psychological thriller.” —Linnea Lannon, Detroit Free Press “One of her lesser-known works . . . and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty. . . . The crime writer Elmore Leonard has written a host of novels with the same basic plot: Plans go wrong. The story message driving all of Highsmith’s work is similarly simple and clear: We live on thin ice. Highsmith revolts some readers, yet hypnotizes many others. She’s sui generis, a writer of almost occult power.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times

First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.

Amid the grandeur of the remote Pacific Northwest stands Kingcome, a village so ancient that, according to Kwakiutl myth, it was founded by the two brothers left on earth after the great flood. The Native Americans who still live there call it Quee, a place of such incredible natural richness that hunting and fishing remain primary food sources. But the old culture of totems and potlatch is being replaces by a new culture of prefab housing and alcoholism. Kingcome's younger generation is disenchanted and alienated from its heritage. And now, coming upriver is a young vicar, Mark Brian, on a journey of discovery that can teach him—and us—about life, death, and the transforming power of love.

Robert Forester is a fundamentally decent man who attracts trouble like a magnet, and when he begins watching the domestic simplicity of Jenny's life through her window, the deceptive calm of suburban Pennsylvania is shattered.

Chronicles the author's rescue of an abandoned barn owlet, from her efforts to resuscitate and raise the young owl through their nineteen years together, during which the author made key discoveries about owl behavior.