Featherhood

Product Description \x27The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years\x27 Neil Gaiman\x27Wonderful \- I can\x27t recommend it too highly\x27 Helen Macdonald\x27One of those rare, enchanted books\x27 Isabella Tree\x27Beautiful \- it made me cry\x27 Simon Amstell\x27I was entranced\x27 Cathy RentzenbrinkThis is a story about birds and fathers.About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour\x27s 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\x27s 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\x27s 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\x27s nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie. Review Featherhood is one of the best books I've ever read. I urge you to seek it out, buy it, and be enchanted. It's incredibly moving and I loved every single page ― Elton John The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years. It announces Charlie Gilmour as a major new writing talent ― Neil Gaiman Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly ― Helen Macdonald, author of H IS FOR HAWK Beautiful, wise, compassionate and powerful, Featherhood is one of those rare, enchanted books that sings to the soul of what it is to be ― Isabella Tree, author of WILDING What a book! I was entranced. A personal reckoning which is simultaneously brutal and joyous. It's full of light. I want to tell everyone about it ― Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of THE LAST ACT OF LOVE This stunning memoir flashes with as many colours as its enchanting subject, and draws us into a world of eccentric characters impossible to predict or forget. Savage, mischievous, moving, sublime ― Rhik Samadder, author of I NEVER SAID I LOVED YOU FEATHERHOOD, it would be tempting to say, is where Helen Macdonald's H Is For Hawk meets Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals. But Charlie Gilmour's memoir is so original and ingeniously wrought, it stands on its own as a book to which others will surely be compared... Gilmour's language is as precise as his gaze is forensic. He is something of a magician himself, conjuring whole vivid personalities with a few deft strokes of his pen... He can slay you with his succinct summoning of a small boy's struggles... and he can dazzle you with the gem-like images of nature he creates which, like all writers who draw you into their orbit, thrum with life... Remarkable.' -- Ginny Dougary ― DAILY MAIL, Book of the Week It is wise, self-aware, never forced, often funny, beautifully crafted, and, in the end, as moving as Kes, that other great work about a boy who is given the gift of liberation by a bird. -- Craig Brown ― MAIL ON SUNDAY A soaring debut... A sincere and searing tale of loss, addictive despair, the redemptive power of love, the natural world and a shit-dropping, feather-moulting talking magpie... This will undoubtedly be held up alongside H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald's memoir that saw her tame her grief and a bird of prey in her living room. But Featherhood is an equal, if not better, work of magpie investigation that ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs. -- Helen Davies ― SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE A profound exploration of grief, fragmented families, nature versus nurture and whether we are doomed to rep