Featherhood

Author: Charlie Gilmour
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501198505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
“I loved every single page.” —Elton John “The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk.” —Neil Gaiman In this moving, critically acclaimed memoir, a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the mischievous bird saves him. One spring day, a baby magpie falls out of its nest and into Charlie Gilmour’s hands. Magpies, he soon discovers, are as clever and mischievous as monkeys. They are also notorious thieves, and this one quickly steals his heart. By the time the creature develops shiny black feathers that inspire the name Benzene, Charlie and the bird have forged an unbreakable bond. While caring for Benzene, Charlie learns his biological father, an eccentric British poet named Heathcote Williams who vanished when Charlie was six months old, is ill. As he grapples with Heathcote’s abandonment, Charlie comes across one of his poems, in which Heathcote describes how an impish young jackdaw fell from its nest and captured his affection. Over time, Benzene helps Charlie unravel his fears about repeating the past—and embrace the role of father himself. A bird falls, a father dies, a child is born. Featherhood is the unforgettable story of a love affair between a man and a bird. It is also a beautiful and affecting memoir about childhood and parenthood, captivity and freedom, grief and love.

The Featherhood

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888617375
Category : Pigeons
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
A fictional account of what happens when the world's most valuable bird, a champion Belgian racing pigeon, escapes and becomes the pet of a group of inner-city children. They have no idea of the bird's value but raise babies from the bird that win a major race, against long odds. An educational and heartwarming story of how the pigeon sport, and pedigreed homing pigeons, functions. Based on the international awarding-winning filmmaker, and author's, more than 50 years of experience in the pigeon hobby.

A Theatre for Dreamers

Author: Polly Samson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526600579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Delicious' Nigella Lawson 'Clever and beguiling' Guardian 'Sublime and immersive' Jojo Moyes Erica is eighteen and ready for freedom. It's the summer of 1960 when she lands on the sun-baked Greek island of Hydra where she is swept up in a circle of bohemian poets, painters, musicians, writers and artists, living tangled lives. Life on their island paradise is heady, dream-like, a string of seemingly endless summer days. But nothing can last forever. 'A surefire summer hit ... At once a blissful piece of escapism and a powerful meditation on art and sexuality' Observer 'Heady armchair escapism ... An impressionistic, intoxicating rush of sensory experience' Sunday Times 'If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one. Immaculate' Andrew O'Hagan

Featherhood

Author: Charlie Gilmour
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501198521
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
In this “vivid…lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir—the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman)—a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him. This is a story of two men who could talk to birds—but were completely incapable of talking to each other. A father who fled from his family in the dead of night, and the jackdaw he raised like a child. A son obsessed with his absence—and the young magpie that fell into his path and refused to fly away. This is a story about the crow family and human family; 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.

All Down Darkness Wide

Author: Seán Hewitt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593300084
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature • Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness • Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed • A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read • Observer Book of the Week • Lammy Finalist “The most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.”—Alexander Chee, The Atlantic • "Rapturous...Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own."—Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review • “Exquisitely written.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot. Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty. Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.

The Corner That Held Them

Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373882
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

Here Comes the Miracle

Author: Anna Beecher
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 147461065X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
'I adored this novel' Pandora Sykes 'Incredibly moving' Charlie Gilmour 'I read it in two evenings' Clover Stroud 'Brilliant' Sarah Moss It begins with a miracle: a baby born too small and too early, but defiantly alive. This is Joe. Then, two years later, Emily, arrives. From the beginning, the siblings' lives are entwined. Snake back through time. In a patch of nettle-infested wilderness, find Edward, seventeen-years-old, and falling in love with another boy. In comes somebody else, Eleanor, with whom Edward starts a family. They find themselves grandparents to Joe and Emily. When Joe is diagnosed with cancer, the family are left waiting for a miracle. From one of our finest new authors, this is a profoundly beautiful novel about the unexpectedness of life and the miracle of love.

Borders and Belonging

Author: Pádraig Ó Tuama
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 1786222582
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 66

Book Description
A leading poet and a theologian reflect on the Old Testament story of Ruth, a tale that resonates deeply in today's world with its themes of migration, the stranger, mixed cultures and religions, law and leadership, women in public life, kindness, generosity and fear. Ruth's story speaks directly to many of the issues and deep differences that Brexit has exposed and to the polarisation taking place in many societies. Pádraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan bring the redemptive power of Ruth to bear on today's seemingly intractable social and political divisions, reflecting on its challenges and how it can help us be effective in the public square, amplify voices which are silenced, and be communities of faith in our present day. Over the last year, the material that inspired this book has been used with over 6000 people as a public theology initiative from Corrymeela, Ireland's longest-established peace and reconciliation centre. It has been met with an overwhelming response because of its immediacy and relevance, enabling people with opposing views to come together and be heard.

The Crane Wife

Author: CJ Hauser
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385547102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation “The Crane Wife” with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy, and self in the twenty-first century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this “elegant masterpiece” (Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger) asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE GUARDIAN, GARDEN & GUN "Hauser builds their life's inventory out of deconstructed personal narratives, resulting in a reading experience that's rich like a complicated dessert—not for wolfing down but for savoring in small bites." —The New York Times “Clever, heartfelt, and wrenching.” —Time “Brilliant.” —Oprah Daily Ten days after calling off their wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, they realized they'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. What if you released yourself from traditional narratives of happiness? What if you looked for ways to leave room for the unexpected? In Hauser’s case, this meant dissecting pop culture touchstone, from The Philadelphia Story to The X Files, to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. They attended a robot convention, contemplated grief at John Belushi’s gravesite, and officiated a wedding. Most importantly, they mapped the difference between the stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose path doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing and to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home to live in.

The Death of Bees

Author: Lisa O'Donnell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062209868
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved. Marnie and her little sister, Nelly, are on their own now. Only they know what happened to their parents, Izzy and Gene, and they aren't telling. While life in Glasgow's Maryhill housing estate isn't grand, the girls do have each other. Besides, it's only a year until Marnie will be considered an adult and can legally take care of them both. As the New Year comes and goes, Lennie, the old man next door, realizes that his young neighbors are alone and need his help. Or does he need theirs? Lennie takes them in—feeds them, clothes them, protects them—and something like a family forms. But soon enough, the sisters' friends, their teachers, and the authorities start asking tougher questions. As one lie leads to another, dark secrets about the girls' family surface, creating complications that threaten to tear them apart. Written with fierce sympathy and beautiful precision, told in alternating voices, The Death of Bees is an enchanting, grimly comic tale of three lost souls who, unable to answer for themselves, can answer only for one another.