All the Birds, Singing

A Novel

By: Evie Wyld

Narrated by: Cat Gould

Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness.

Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rain and battering wind. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wants it to be. But every few nights something - or someone - picks off one of the sheep and sounds a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, and rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back - a past that threatens to break into the present.

With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption.

©2021 Evie Wyld (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

One of the Best Books of the Year in the Guardian, New Statesman, Independent, Observer

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, and the Costa Award for Best Novel

Winner of the Encore Award for Best Second Novel

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award

“Swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won’t only root for Jake, you’ll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling. There’s hope at the end, and wit, and friendship.... She’s unlike any character I’ve seen in fiction.” (Maile Meloy, New York Times Book Review)

“Purely gorgeous.... Writing with assurance and just enough embedded clues to help us understand what she is doing, Wyld ramps up the tension.... There’s love as well as dread in this book, a surprising sort of love - the best kind of all.” (Washington Post)

“Gloriously gruesome... Half of you wants to race through to find out what happens, half wants to pause over the dark, clotted sentences. And then the state of suspense becomes almost unbearable, and you rush through, feeling like you are sprinting through a museum of sinister curiosities, too frightened to linger.... The final revelation, when it comes, is explosive.” (NPR.org)

Full of ghastly men and sheep

This is the story of a singularly uninteresting woman who has not much better to do than caw in nonsense bird-speak and repeat that the human eye notices movement above all else as though these were profound utterances.

The story chops and changes between indeterminate locations in Australia and Britain without much clarity about where you are in any given chapter. It’s chockablock full of useless and unimportant detail and short on important information that would move the story along. She smokes “holidays” and has unpleasant sex, but so what? She has a man’s name and one of the men has a woman’s name, just to confuse you even more.

I found it a frustrating read and had I known what I was in for, I would never have bought this title. Do yourself a favour and give this one a miss. Awful and forgettable in equal measure.