Featherhood

Book excerpt: 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.