Watch of Gryphons and Other Stories

by Owen Marshall

The empty tussock dryness of New Zealand’s South Island, the ancient stone buildings of Italy’s Perugia, unsolved murder, the capricious indignity of Alzheimer’s disease, adoption – there is a rich variety of setting and subject in this superb new collection by short fiction master Owen Marshall. Several longer stories give Watch The Gryphons a special depth and resonance, but present, as always, is the startling range and subtlety of emotion readers have come to expect from this most gifted of writers. Few other authors can move as deftly from the almost unbearably touching to the wildly absurd or the tenderly ordinary; few can see so much within and behind the everyday of life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Owen Marshall has written, or edited, over twenty-five books. He has held fellowships at the Universities of Canterbury and Otago, and in Menton, France. In 2000, he received the Officer of the Order of New Zealand Merit (ONZM), and in the same year his novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction. Marshall is an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury, which awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 2002. He was awarded the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) in 2012 for services to literature, and in 2013 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction.

Reviews

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

This was another thoroughly enjoyable trove of yarns from Marshall, maybe only two or three would have been duffers and quite a number of them were really well developed and made for really good reading. As ever he produces some vivid and powerful snapshots of rural and random life in New Zealand’s South Island with the occasional diversions to the North Island and even Perugia (where this collection takes its name from).