Evie Wyld

Living in voluntary isolation with only a disobedient collie and a flock of sheep for companions, a woman on a storm-battered British island struggles with memories about her haunted past and endures fear of an unknown assailant that has been targeting her sheep. By the award-winning author of After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. 30,000 first printing.

All the Birds, Singing

Janice Hopper

What a sad, strange little book. I might have enjoyed this better if I hadn't listened to the audio version, I think. The narrator I listened to wasn't that great, and it was occasionally difficult to follow the time-shifting story line.

I started being fairly sympathetic to the main character. By the end of the book, I felt sorry for her in a different way - that feeling you get when you're sorry someone's in terrible circumstances, but where you also shake your head a little, knowing that a lot of their predicament was a consequence of their actions. The way the back-story is revealed really keeps you wondering about what has happened all the way through to the end. 

And then there are the ghosts you carry with you, always. Sometimes life turns around on just one bad (or good) decision, even when the decision happens without much thought. Lives are changed, and consequences follow down the halls of your life.

Daryl Houston

This is one of the strangest books I've read recently. I had a little trouble reading the first third or so of it, not because it was a difficult read in the way that some books are difficult reads but more because, even though the prose isn't terribly elaborate or ornate, it just felt like it took more time than I expected to get from word to word, sentence to sentence. This is weird in what's really a pretty short book. I blew through the second two thirds in a night. Maybe I just learned to bounce over what felt like sluggish prose, or maybe the story began to capture my interest more; I'm not sure.

In the end, I'm really ambivalent about the book. There's definitely menace lurking in its pages (as the cover of my edition advertises), but I feel like there's a lot that I just haven't worked out about how to receive the book. The weird beast. What all the twinning/tripletting means. The strange departure into the Big Cataclysmic Event of her childhood. There's definitely structure here, and there are some neat things, such as the contrast between her coming to Otto's household and Lloyd's coming to hers, but I wasn't able to piece it together into a coherent sort of worldview or anything. Which is maybe ok. Everything doesn't have to be tidy.

Millie Eaton

Barış Yarsel

vive

Emily Perkovich

Chrystal Giordano

Edward

Jake Whyte, a single woman is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. But something is coming for the sheep, every few nights it picks one off and leaves it in rags

Sara Holman

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags. It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award Winner of the Encore Award Winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction

All the Birds, Singing

Reviews