Featherhood

Featherhood is one of the best books I've ever read. I urge you to seek it out, buy it, and be enchanted. It's incredibly moving and I loved every single page * Elton John * The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years. It announces Charlie Gilmour as a major new writing talent * Neil Gaiman * Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly * Helen Macdonald, author of H IS FOR HAWK * Beautiful, wise, compassionate and powerful, Featherhood is one of those rare, enchanted books that sings to the soul of what it is to be * Isabella Tree, author of WILDING * What a book! I was entranced. A personal reckoning which is simultaneously brutal and joyous. It's full of light. I want to tell everyone about it * Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of THE LAST ACT OF LOVE * This stunning memoir flashes with as many colours as its enchanting subject, and draws us into a world of eccentric characters impossible to predict or forget. Savage, mischievous, moving, sublime * Rhik Samadder, author of I NEVER SAID I LOVED YOU * FEATHERHOOD, it would be tempting to say, is where Helen Macdonald's H Is For Hawk meets Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals. But Charlie Gilmour's memoir is so original and ingeniously wrought, it stands on its own as a book to which others will surely be compared... Gilmour's language is as precise as his gaze is forensic. He is something of a magician himself, conjuring whole vivid personalities with a few deft strokes of his pen... He can slay you with his succinct summoning of a small boy's struggles... and he can dazzle you with the gem-like images of nature he creates which, like all writers who draw you into their orbit, thrum with life... Remarkable.' -- Ginny Dougary * DAILY MAIL, Book of the Week * It is wise, self-aware, never forced, often funny, beautifully crafted, and, in the end, as moving as Kes, that other great work about a boy who is given the gift of liberation by a bird. -- Craig Brown * MAIL ON SUNDAY * A soaring debut... A sincere and searing tale of loss, addictive despair, the redemptive power of love, the natural world and a shit-dropping, feather-moulting talking magpie... This will undoubtedly be held up alongside H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald's memoir that saw her tame her grief and a bird of prey in her living room. But Featherhood is an equal, if not better, work of magpie investigation that ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs. -- Helen Davies * SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE * A profound exploration of grief, fragmented families, nature versus nurture and whether we are doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers. But it is also a gladdening celebration of what it is to nurture and bring forth new life. -- Caroline Sanderson * SUNDAY EXPRESS S MAGAZINE * A beautiful book, sensitive and compelling - it made me cry * Simon Amstell * I loved Featherhood. About nature and growth, about belonging and not belonging, it is beautiful * Andrew O'Hagan, author of THE ILLUMINATIONS * Utterly absorbing, astonishingly well-written, full of heart, Featherhood is the most arresting book I've read for a very long time * Cressida Connolly, author of AFTER THE PARTY * The extraordinary story of an extraordinary family * Sophie Heawood, author of THE HANGOVER GAMES * Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships and the struggle to smash generational cycles. -- David Marsland * EVENING STANDARD * A wonderful, moving book. His account of raising a young magpie offers a lovely insight into this fascinating bird * James Macdonald Lockhart, author of RAPTOR * [An] affecting and beautifully written memoir. * THE BOOKSELLER, Editor's Choice * A good time in a weird way - I have never read anything so filthy * Nell Zink, author of THE WALL CREEPER * Emotional, touching and often odd, Gilmour's memoir about two key relationships - one with his late father and the other with

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.