Products specifications
Author
|
Charlie Gilmour |
Pub Date
|
18/03/2021 |
Binding
|
Paperback / softback |
Pages
|
288 |
Country
|
United Kingdom |
Dewey
|
304.27 |
GBPPrice
|
8.99 |
Availability
|
Available |
'The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years' Neil Gaiman
'Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly' Helen Macdonald
'One of those rare, enchanted books' Isabella Tree
'Beautiful - it made me cry' Simon Amstell
'I was entranced' Cathy Rentzenbrink
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.