"Where the crawdads sing" by Delia Owens

An audio book. I hadn't heard of the book though it's already a film.

1969. The body of Chase Andrews (married womaniser) is found at the foot of a tower. Maybe not suicide - no tracks or fingerprints left, as if they were tidied up after.

1952. Kya, aged 6 (youngest of 5), lives in swamps on the North Carolina coastline - the land's rumoured to have been occupied by shipwrecked sailors, escaped slaves, men back from war. It's not lawless. People invent their own laws - "amongst themselves doves fight as much as hawks". The "village is tired of arguing with the elements".

One day she watches her mother leave. Later her last sibling, Jodie, leaves. Her father gives her money weekly to look after the place. She sits on the porch waiting for her mother to return. She doesn't know her date of birth, isn't sure of her full name. She's picked up by the authorities and taken to school. She lasts a day. She's called a swamp rat. When 7 she meets Tate. Via a sudden change of PoV we learn that he lives with a caring, sensitive father. His mother and sister died in an accident on the way to buying him a birthday present. She doesn't talk to him again for years. She looks out for him.

She asks to fish with her father in their boat. For a while they're friends. By the time she's 10 his absences sometimes last a month. He returns none the worse. She still can't read, but has found a friendly black shopkeeper, Jumping, who generously barters with her, giving her clothes for mussels. Jumping's wife helps her deal with periods, etc. She tries to understand human behaviour by reference to the animal behaviour she observes.

Then there's backstory about her parents (was she told it by her mother?). Her mother was cultured, a painter. Her father was injured in WW2 while being a coward but got a medal for it. He came from a well-to-do family but was always a waster.

Kya thinks Tate leaves feathers for her. And seeds. And spark plugs. She's 14 now. He's 18. He teaches her to read and write. They nearly have sex - he more cautious than she. Then he goes to university, promising to return. He does, but only to watch her from a distance - he's decided that she wouldn't like university life. He contacts her again 5 years later, by which time she's with Chase, who she'd fancied for a while - "loneliness has a compass of its own". He tries to have sex with her. She resists and he understands. He promises to marry her and eventually they make unsatisfactory love.

Tate returns. She doesn't forgive him for not returning. He suggests that Kya gets a book published about swamp biology - she's done illustrations. She gets a $5,000 advance. She discovers that Chase is engaged to someone else. She's consoled by poetry.

When she's in her mid-twenties her favourite brother Jodie returns and promises to stay in touch, feeling guilty that he hasn't contacted her earlier (it's been maybe 20 years). He's heard that their mother died 2 years before. He recommends Tate to her.

Meanwhile the murder investigate progresses. Kya's a suspect. Some clues are too obvious, some alibis seem pre-arranged. They have trouble tracking her down but in the end arrest her. The court case begins - death sentence being an option. We learn that Chase tried to rape her. She understands why her mother never came back. She fears that Chase will exact revenge. She sees a female praying mantis eat a mate as it continues copulating. She recalls how fireflies send out misleading signals.

She's aquitted. She and Tate live at her house. Jodie and his kids often visit. She publishes more books. No children. When she's 64 Tate finds her in her boat, drifting. "her heart had quietly stopped". He discovers a stash of poems she'd written (and sometimes had published) under a pen name he recognised (so she's beautiful, a scientist, a painter and a poet). One of the poems reads like a confession. He burns it.

Because in her cell she hadn't speculated over who was the murderer, I thought she'd done it. But I also suspected Tate's father. I also wondered if someone else (maybe Tate) would be sentenced and she'd falsely confess so he'd be freed.

Light provokes figurative language, especially at the start of chapters - "Murky shafts of light streamed through" etc. I'm surprised that someone who lives such an isolated life could cope with the setbacks in her social life, and could produce satisfactory material for a popular text book. It's page-turner all the same.

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Other reviews

• goodreads
• Mark Lawson (the tone of the central section sometimes feels like YA, as Kya is instructed by a wise African American woman (one of the supporting characters who flirt with virtuous cliche) in the mysteries of men and menstruation. ... Owens combines high tension with precise detail about how people dress, sound, live and eat – the case studies in her book are both human and natural. Surprise bestsellers are often works that chime with the times. Though set in the 1950s and 60s, Where the Crawdads Sing is, in its treatment of racial and social division and the fragile complexities of nature, obviously relevant to contemporary politics and ecology. But these themes will reach a huge audience though the writer’s old-fashioned talents for compelling character, plotting and landscape description.)
• Alexandra Alter (In the summer of 2018, Putnam published an unusual debut novel by a retired wildlife biologist named Delia Owens. The book, which had an odd title and didn’t fit neatly into any genre, hardly seemed destined to be a blockbuster, so Putnam printed about 28,000 copies. ... As the end of 2019 approaches, “Crawdads” has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year ... Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. ... For a book about a girl who is isolated in the wilderness and wrestling with loneliness, “Crawdads” has had an oddly unifying effect in a time of rapid technological advances and constant social media connectivity. ... One of the most surprising things about the success of “Crawdads” is that sales began to accelerate months after it came out — an anomaly in publishing ... “I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years,” said Jaci Updike, president of sales for Penguin Random House, who has overseen strategies for best sellers like “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl.” “This book has broken all the friggin’ rules.")