Featherhood : '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

Author(s): Gilmour, Charlie,
Binding: Paperback,
Date of Publication: 18/03/2021,
Pagination: 288 pages,
Series: N/A,
Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
Published By: Orion Publishing Co,
Book Classification: Wildlife: birds & birdwatching, Memoirs
ISBN13\EAN\SKU: 9781474609487

Description:
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.