Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing is a novel by the American writer and zoologist Delia Owens, published in 2018.

It tells two stories that run alongside each other until they meet. In the first, a girl called Kya is left to raise herself in the marshes of coastal North Carolina and grows up alone, learning the water and the wildlife because there is nobody left to teach her anything else. In the second, investigators in the town of Barkley Cove look into the death of a young man called Chase Andrews, who was well known there and who had crossed paths with her.

The marsh is what the novel pays most attention to, and Kya's knowledge of it is what she has instead of family or schooling: she gathers shells and feathers, draws what she finds and keeps her own records of it. Owens worked as a zoologist before she wrote fiction, and the detail she gives the landscape comes out of that. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the book is as concerned with what a small town decides a girl like Kya must be as it is with what happened to Chase.