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: ... biography I have read in years' Neil Gaiman

\x27The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk<\/i>, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years\x27 Neil Gaiman<\/b>\n\x27Wonderful \- I can\x27t recommend it too highly\x27 Helen Macdonald<\/b>\n\x27One of those rare, enchanted books\x27 Isabella Tree<\/b>\n\x27Beautiful \- it made me cry\x27 Simon Amstell<\/b>\n\x27I was entranced\x27 Cathy Rentzenbrink<\/b>\nThis is a story about birds and fathers.\nAbout the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour\x27s life \- and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair...\nAbout the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie\x27s biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.\nIt 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\x27s own.\nIt 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\x27s nest.\nAnd ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.<\/p>