Author: Gilmour, Charlie
Father’s Day
Published on 18 March 2021 by Orion Publishing Co (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in the United Kingdom.
Paperback | 288 pages
128 x 197 x 36 | 266g
'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 RentzenbrinkThis 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.