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Featherhood

By: Charlie Gilmour
Narrated by: Charlie Gilmour
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Publisher's Summary

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.

©2019 Charlie Gilmour (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group

Critic Reviews

"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)

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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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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.