Folio Society Published Works Number 2850
Garner, Alan - The Owl Service
We buy and sell items like these, so please contact us if you have similar items for sale, and we will make you an offer if we are interested.
To check if we have this item, or similar items, in stock, please click the Check Stock link below. Alternatively, use the links on the left to search our large online database of items for sale, or to visit the rest of the site.
Check Stock
Garner, Alan - The Owl Service (Published in by The Folio Society in 2013. Introduced by Susan Cooper. Illustrated by Darren Hopes. Alan Garner's mesmerising mythical tale tells of three young children who awaken a deadly mythical power. Introduced by Susan Cooper.The Owl Service. 'A rare imaginative feast and the taste that it leaves is haunting'. Observer. This mesmerising novel won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction prize. Inspired by a legend from the Mabinogion and set in a remote Welsh valley, it tells the story of three young people who awaken a deadly mythical power. When Alison discovers the owl service, a set of plates painted with an ambiguous, shape-shifting pattern, her curiosity soon grows into an obsession. The plates awaken Blodeuwedd, a woman made from flowers to be the wife of a young lord and transformed into an owl after betraying him. Though they do not know it – the extent to which the myth has already shaped their lives emerges only slowly – Alison, Roger and Gwyn have revived a terrible anguish that lies smouldering in the mountains and woods around them. Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the story is its merging of reality and myth – one that becomes all the more eerie when Garner explains the origins of the book in his introduction. The myth both fuels and feeds on real tensions and insecurities: Gwyn's vulnerable attachment to Alison; Roger's jealousy and derision; and Alison's growing isolation. Can they resist its malign influence or is another tragedy inevitable? Written in simple, powerful prose, this is at once a tale of magic and a subtle story about how patterns – rooted in the stories we tell and in the real and complex dynamics of class, and national and individual identities – play out over generations. Susan Cooper, a fellow traveller of mythical landscapes, has written a new preface for this edition. She writes that 'awareness of time past is the air that Alan Garner's imagination breathes'. Darren Hopes has created a series of beguiling illustrations. Production Details. The Owl Service book. New preface by Susan Cooper. Illustrated by Darren Hopes. Bound in cloth. 176 pages. Frontispiece and 7 colour illustrations. Book size: 9" x 6". )
