New Zealand's most celebrated author, Janet Frame, published her first novel, Owls Do Cry, in 1957 to almost instantaneous critical recognition and praise throughout the English-speaking world. A prose stylist of rare ability, Frame was able to refine a method of injecting deeply personal impressionistic passages within a traditional narrative framework to achieve a whole that artistically surpassed its component parts. Her acute sensitivity towards her characters and their lives made Frame much more than a mere craftsman of beautiful passages.

Frame's own battles with mental illness, recounted in autobiographical works such as the acclaimed An Angel at My Table, made her literary achievements all the more remarkable. She began writing short stories while still institutionalized. A legend developed after she was scheduled to receive a lobotomy when the surgeon learned that she had won a literary prize for a short story and scuttled the surgery. In Owls Do Cry the character Daphne Withers, like Frame, is institutionalized. Frame brilliantly conveys the mental unravelling of the character and her grim surroundings while retaining a crystalline clarity for the reader.

Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family from Waimaru, New Zealand, working-class laborers who struggle with life at a near poverty level. In delicate, highly poetic prose Frame reveals the triumphs and tragedies of a close-knit family as life pulls them apart.

Edge of the Alphabet, published in 1962, is the sequel to Owls Do Cry.