You don’t need to live in the South to be up to your ears in singing crawdads.
Delia Owens’ thriller “Where the Crawdads Sing” has been an inescapable best seller since it hit shelves in 2018. After four years and more than 12 million copies sold worldwide, it’s now also a film produced by Reese Witherspoon, whose Hello Sunshine book club helped fuel the success of the novel. The book has spent more than 200 weeks on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, including 17 weeks at No. 1. The film, released last week and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and David Strathairn, brought in $17 million on its opening weekend in theaters.
It’s a success story that seems plucked from a fairy tale, a first-time novelist, now 73, becoming a worldwide sensation with her page-turning story of a plucky girl from the marshes of North Carolina suspected of murder.
But that’s not the only reason people are talking about Owens: The author is herself wanted for questioning in a decades-old murder.
‘Where the Crawdads Sing’:The biggest changes between the book and movie
Who was Delia Owens before she was a best selling novelist?
For two decades, Delia Owens worked as a wildlife conservationist in Africa.
Owens grew up in Georgia and studied zoology at the University of Georgia, where she met Mark Owens, now her ex-husband, and became stepmother to his son Christopher Owens. In the 1970s, Delia and Mark Owens relocated to the remote Kalahari Desert of Botswana to establish a research station…
