Corsair to reissue Delia Owens wildlife memoir

A memoir by Where the Crawdads Sing author Delia Owens and her husband Mark Owens, titled Cry of the Kalahari, will be reissued by Corsair in October, 36 years after its first release.

Corsair publisher James Gurbutt bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Lucy Morris at Curtis Brown.

The memoir — originally published in the US in 1984, and in 1985 in the UK by HarperCollins — will be published on 7th October in hardback, trade paperback and e-book. 

“Cry of the Kalahari is Mark and Delia Owens’ account of their time researching wildlife in the Kalahari Desert in the early 1970s,” Corsair said. “Beautifully illustrated with colour plate sections, including maps and — for the first time — full colour photographs from the authors’ archives." When originally published, the book won numerous awards including the John Burroughs Medal for Best Natural History Book of the Year.

The blurb reads: “Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Mark and Delia Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a third-hand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water for thousands of square miles. In this vast wilderness [the couple] began their zoology research, working alongside animals that had never before been exposed to humans.” 
 
“An international bestseller on original release, Cry of the Kalahari is the story of [their] life with lions, brown hyenas, jackals, giraffes, and the many other creatures they came to know. It is also a gripping account of how they survived the dangers of living in one of the last and largest pristine areas on Earth.” 

Delia Owens is the co-author of two other non-fiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. The bestselling North American-set Where the Crawdads Sing was her first novel, published by Corsair in the UK in 2019. It has now sold 310,624 units in paperback, excluding lockdown-era sales, according to Nielsen BookScan’s UK Total Consumer Market.