The Complete Novellas

by Agnes Owens

This complete collection of Agnes Owens' five novellas opens with 'Like Birds in the Wilderness', a portrait of brickie Mac. He's a straightforward guy with a talent for laying bricks and a liking for the drink who decides to head to the oil-rich north to seek his fortune. 'A Working Mother' is a wildly entertaining cautionary tale: while Betty's husband, Adam, broods and drinks (to be matched at times by Betty, just to be sociable) she flirts with their best friend Brendan and tries to avoid the roving hands of her new employer. They're all driving Betty crazy. In 'For the Love of Willie' Owens takes a sensitive, canny look at wartime teenage pregnancy - a tale as relevant now as ever. 'Bad Attitudes' and 'Jen's Party' conclude the collection: both deadly, darkly funny stories about family relationships and love on the dole.

Like Birds in the Wilderness, 1987
A Working Mother, 1994
For the Love of Willie, 1998
Bad Attitudes, 2004
Jen’s Party, 2004

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Scotland

498 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2009

About the author

Agnes Owens was a Scottish author. She was born in Milngavie in 1926 and spent most of her life on the west coast of Scotland. She has been married twice and raised seven children, also working as a cleaner, typist and factory worker.

Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_O...

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing to see here unless you like terse perfect pointillist minimal laconic wry heartrending tales of bricklayers, pregnant teenagers, drunks and other working class scallywags.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Birds in the Wilderness - 2 stars (abandoned)
A Working Mother - 3 stars
For the Love of Willie - 4 stars
Bad Attitudes - 2 stars (abandoned)
Jen's Party - 3 stars

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't believe Agnes Owens completely passed me by until very recently. Excellent collection of novellas with Working Mother and For the Love of Willie being the standouts. Will look out more of her works on the back of this.

Superb insight into working class life, full of wit and dark humour without coming across as condensing or needlessly gritty.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Various encomia adorn both the back cover (“Agnes Owens is one of Scotland’s best yet most overlooked writers,”) and the before-the-title pages of this book. Owens is someone of whose name I’d been aware but whose work I’d never sampled till now, an omission a chance encounter in a local library enabled me to rectify.
Like Birds in the Wilderness is a rather rambling tale of an unemployed bricklayer with a fondness for drink who moves to a northern city seeking work, meets a girl, encounters a military type who cryptically offers him unspecified employment, goes hiking in the highlands, returns home.
A Second World War childhood/adolescence figure in both A Working Mother and For the Love of Willie.
Betty is the titular working mother, the focus around which the events of the novella orbit. She is married to a war hero, but the only things she and her husband, Adam, have in common are alcohol and two children. As her husband is unemployed she goes back to work to help support the family. Her job takes her into the office of widower Mr Robson. This relationship, like hers with Adam’s friend Brendan, is not what propriety deems it should be. A few final scenes undercut the reliability of the previous narrative by revealing Betty is telling her story to a fellow mental patient.
Any unreliability issues are addressed at the start of For the Love of Willie where Peggy is an inmate in a psychiatric ward who announces to fellow patient, the duchess, her intention to write a novel based on her own life, scrounging or stealing paper to do so. The two phases of Peggy’s life are then told in parallel describing how her wartime employment in the shop of Willie Roper led to her present state. Peggy’s mother tells her warningly, “No man’s as nice as he looks” and also that (men) have habits worse than dogs. Peggy herself tells the duchess that love is only sex with a sugar coating round it. I note here that this novella’s title may be a crude pun.
Bad Attitudes revolves around the doings of the Dawson family - recently decanted from a condemned terrace to a new council flat - the busybody downstairs, her across the close neighbour, the local councillor they both consult, the one man who refuses to leave the old terrace, the tinkers who have squatted there and their sister/in-law. It takes a strange turn near the end when two murders are committed in the terrace.
In Jen’s Party Jen lives penuriously with her mum, Maude, and Aunt Belle. Her father is in jail but she thinks he merely left and is well off somewhere with another woman. Belle is a force of nature, blithely careening through life while Maude feels the struggle. Belle organises a party for Jen’s fourteenth birthday which, on the day, brings all sorts of things to a head. The dialogue between Maude and her sister in this story is immensely readable and sparkles with authenticity.
One of Scotland’s best writers? I’m not wholly convinced yet, but she is certainly worth reading. I’ll look for more.

[James Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest and funny look into working class lives. Dark and funny in equal parts. Brilliant characters getting up to all sorts of nonsense.
Agnes Owens is seriously underrated or perhaps just not yet widely enough known.

[Shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book! Was my boyfriends gran that wrote the book😚

[Eilidh Fyfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

you have always been so stunningly underrated agnes what a wonder