Day 4: All the Birds, Singing
On the fourth day of Christmas, my literary love bought for me…
Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing!
Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing is the story of one how one woman’s present comes from a terrible past. It was awarded the 2014 Miles Franklin Award.
Is this your perfect Christmas gift?
The 2014 Stella Prize judges said of All the Birds, Singing:
On a nameless island where the wind and rain are unrelenting, Jake Whyte lives alone but for her dog and her flock of sheep, away from other people and clearly in some way damaged. But fear sets in when something starts savaging her sheep, and even invading her house, though she can never work out what it is or manage to confront it. Gradually she begins to trust a few other people as she tries to deal with the threat to her sheep and possibly even to herself.
Only when we learn something of Jake’s former life in faraway Australia do we begin to think that the nameless beast might be somehow connected with her own past. Wyld structures and paces the story with extraordinary skill, revealing Jake’s former life one detail at a time in a slow burn that only catches fire at the very end of the novel, where we learn the full extent of her guilt and dread, and realise with hindsight that one of this book’s subjects is the destructive force of jealousy and thwarted love. The novel is a gripping and compelling read; its Gothic elements make it powerfully atmospheric and spooky, and the reader is irresistibly carried along by the flawless pacing of a mystery and its revelation.
Links and Media
- Read Maile Meloy’s review for the New York Times.
- Read Mandy Sayer’s review for the Sydney Morning Herald.
- Read Geordie Williamson’s review for the Australian.
- Read Tim Lewis’ review for the Guardian.
- Read an interview between Evie Wyld and Courtney Collins on ABC Arts.
