Featherhood

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

By: Charlie Gilmour

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eBook | 27 August 2020

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320 Pages

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'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

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.

About the Author

Charlie Gilmour was born in 1989 and raised in London and Sussex. He read history at Cambridge University, with a brief interlude in 2011 at Her Majesty's Prison Wandsworth. He lives in South London with his wife, Janina, and their daughter, Olga.

Industry Reviews

'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 Rentzenbrink