Swifts and Us: The Life of the Bird that Sleeps in the Sky

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It’s a book written by an ordinary person for ordinary readers, about ordinary people helping an extraordinary species.

They eat the same foods day after day, do the same things week after week, and slowly work on refurbishing the wooden sailing boat he gave her. The characters are bold and brilliant in all sorts of ways; there’s some ingenious takes on the usual family get-together. When a character suggests that Shenanigan “can’t help her name,” indicating that the Swift family Dictionary is in some way magical, Phenomena decides to make a scientific study by observing Shenanigan’s activities. It’s a linked short story collection set in Magadan in northeast Russia – known for Stalin’s forced-labour camps. His most recent novel—cowritten with Mark Oshiro (they/them)— The Sun and the Star is also very proudly queer as it focuses on a young gay hero and his boyfriend.Here he applied the same pattern across the pond, taking an 11,000-mile road trip around Britain with his wife Nellie.

There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. The book opens with a tale of woe about a swift that Gibson adopts and then proceeds to injure (never throw a swift from a window, folks).It is not easy to express awe in writing without flipping into hyperbole or cliche, but in his promise to express “how it takes a whole universe to make just the one small black bird”, Cocker aims high. There are multiple species of swift – in southern Spain one can see five types – and in general they are considered to be of least conservation concern, but these matters are all relative in these days of climate crisis. The lines between help and hindrance are too blurry, the background of human interference too bleak.