VAL HENNESSY

OWLS DO CRY

by Janet Frame

(Virago £8.99) Janet Frame’s teenage breakdown and harrowing years in mental institutions are well-documented.

echoes of these ordeals occur in her acclaimed first novel (1957), which dazzles, puzzles and delights with its mesmerising prose, lyrical streams of consciousness and indelible evocations of childhood.

It’s the story of the close-knit Withers family, whose four children are raised in a new Zealand seaside town. their activities — happy or tragic — are glimpsed through the marvelling eyes of a child.

she gazes at a duck, which ‘gleams blue and green like a split rainbow’, and at the ocean, which ‘lay like a quilt with the waves turned under’.

at the book’s core are shadows of new Zealander Frame’s mental anguish, ultimately conquered by pen and ink and by escaping into her own extraordinary imagination. THE MAIDEN DINOSAUR

by Janet McNeill

(Turnpike £12) ‘We were instructed to be pure, but no one gave us any information how to be anything else,’ sighs sarah in this entertaining evocation of middle-age regrets.

For 30 years, a group of Irish women have met regularly at tea shops to laugh over old times, think of their hips when the cake stand appears and recall how sexually innocent they were compared to feisty modern schoolgirls.

spinster sarah — 50-plus, plain, chubby and never been loved — feels unqualified to speculate about sex. Fulfilled by her teaching job, kind, dutiful and helpful, to be needed is her rare blessing.

as the story unfolds, we learn, through flashbacks, that a childhood trauma has left her emotionally damaged.

mcneill’s witty, sharply observed book, written in 1964, is a joy. she puts the spin into spinster and — jolly hockysticks! — even contrives a surprise upbeat ending. SMALL G

by Patricia Highsmith

(Virago £8.99) to be blunt, Highsmith’s final book is a turkey. Completed just months before her death in 1995, its main setting is a small, seedy bar in Zurich.

Here, the neighbourhood gays and bohemians congregate for sauerkraut and sausages.

rickie’s boyfriend is fatally stabbed. Grieving, paunchy and 50ish, he befriends Luisa who lives in fear of her employer and landlady — an old harridan with a club foot.

However, rickie is kind at heart, unexpected friendships bloom and the club-footed one gets her comeuppance.

With no plot twists, psychological suspense, or escalating menace, only the most diehard fan will plough through to the end.