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Featherhood

On Birds and Fathers

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Featherhood

By: Charlie Gilmour
Narrated by: Charlie Gilmour
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About this listen

 'One of the best books I have ever read. Incredibly moving' Elton John

'I cant recommend it too highly' Helen Macdonald

'Ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs' Sunday Times

'Where Helen Macdonald's H Is For Hawk meets Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals ... Remarkable' Daily Mail

'Beautiful, wise, compassionate and powerful' Isabella Tree

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.

'An incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships and the struggle to smash generational cycles' Evening Standard


'A personal reckoning which is simultaneously brutal and joyous. I was entranced' Cathy Rentzenbrink


'A beautiful book - it made me cry' Simon Amstell©2019 Charlie Gilmour (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group Animals Birds Birdwatching Parenting & Families Parents & Adult Children

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Thoughtful reflections with no sugar-coated Truths

Deeply moving and sensitive without being saccharin. Beautifully captures the way humour (sometimes absurd, dark, and/or inappropriate) punctuates the difficult times of life and death, adding to the complexities of how one should feel and move forward. Apples may not fall far from trees, but they need not follow the same paths of deconstruction.

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