The Owl Service (1967) – Alan Garner Free Audiobook

Written by Alan Garner
Read by Wayne Forester
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 56 Kbps
Unabridged

After hearing scratches in the attic, Alison discovers a dinner service covered in an intriguing floral owl pattern, and a series of events are set in motion that will change her life forever. Alison, her step-brother Roger, and Welsh boy Gwyn are forced into a cyclical replay of the tragic Welsh legend of Blodeuwedd, in which a woman is turned into an owl as a punishment for betraying her husband.

The Owl Service is a fabulous, multi-layered book of mystery and suspense, but also a contemporary musing on love, class structure and power.

Alan Garner OBE (1934)

Best known for his children’s fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.

Born in Congleton, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as ‘The Edge’, where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then briefly at Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen”, was published in 1960. A children’s fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, “The Moon of Gomrath” (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, “Elidor” (1965), “The Owl Service” (1967) and “Red Shift” (1973).

Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced “The Stone Book Quartet” (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled “Alan Garner’s Fairy Tales of Gold” (1979), “Alan Garner’s Book of British Fairy Tales” (1984) and “A Bag of Moonshine” (1986). In his subsequent novels, “Strandloper” (1996) and “Thursbitch” (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy, “Boneland”.

Original MP3 audio (32kbs@22,050Hz mono) extracted and split into chapters without re-encoding by inAudible 1.75.