Featherhood

Critics Review

• 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.’

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 a magpie – lingers long after the final page.

  I NEWSPAPER

• I’m having a lovely time with Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour. He is such a tender writer, the book is a magical encounter with birds and fathers.

  Andrew O'Hagan in GUARDIAN

• Touching and true, with flashes of black humour, it’s a fascinating story. It’s also a brilliant examination of nature vs nurture. Gilmour is certainly a born writer.

  THE SPECTATOR, Books of the Year

• Written with economy, insight, and rare beauty – a perfect nature memoir for our times

  THE SPECTATOR

• A tender coming-of-age memoir. It’s an intelligent debut that shows that Gilmour, for all his celebrity family connections, is undoubtedly a remarkable writer in his own right.

  THE SUNDAY TIMES, Memoir of the Year

• Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships.

  THE OLDIE

• Gilmour’s unforgettable memoir is both a beautiful piece of nature writing about caring for a magpie and a brutally honest account of his difficult relationship with his late father, the poet Heathcote Williams.

  I NEWSPAPER, Best Books of 2020

• A delicately choreographed story of salvation through a bird, with echoes of Barry Hines’s classic A Kestrel For A Knave.

  MAIL ON SUNDAY, Best Books of the Year

• Bird and author explore this explosive terrain in an exhilarating dance of transformation, from wild to tame, captivity to freedom and darkness to light.

  THE TABLET, Best Books of the Year

• Gilmour… is fearless in sharing himself with readers. As he works through his relationships, the emotional freight is not always subtle, but this comes from a generosity and openness on his part, which, ultimately, is what makes “Featherhood” so lovely and inviting. Gilmour practices no magic here; he distracts the reader with no glitzy baubles. He gives us a man and a bird and tells us, best he can, what they’ve come to know about the world as it is. He is willing to spill a little blood.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

• Redemptive, beautifully written and often very funny, this is a moving study of the power of human (and magpie) love to repair even the most wounded heart.

  DAILY MAIL