Description
Life, family and the echoes of generations examined through the prism of a love affair with birds, in this breathtakingly assured memoir.
'Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly.' - Helen Macdonald, author of H is For Hawk
This is a story about birds and fathers.
About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair...
About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.
It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.
It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.
And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.
Number of pages: 288
Dimensions: 198 x 126 x 24 mm
