Featherhood

''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''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 RentzenbrinkThis 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.