All The Birds, Singing (Shortlisted For Costa Novel Award)

Description: Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags. It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back. All the Birds, Singing tells the life of an outsider. With extreme artistry and empathy, it reveals an existence of diurnal beauty, incremental horrors, stubborn hope and tentative redemption.

Review: "Wyld is a writer who reconfigures the conventions of storytelling with a sure-footedness and ambition which belie her age... What makes the book so outstanding is the beauty and simplicity of the writing." -- Cressida Connolly Spectator "One feels the influence of an early Ian McEwan or Iain Banks. But All the Birds, Singing, is also powerfully original, strongest in its handling of the human and animal worlds, and the thin line between the two." -- Sophie Ratcliffe Times Literary Supplement "All The Birds, Singing is extraordinarily accomplished, one of those books that tears around in your cerebellum like a dark firework, and which, upon finishing, you immediately want to pick up again" -- Melissa Harrison Financial Times "A hair-prickling thriller. It's the quality of [Wyld's] prose that really blows your mind." -- Claire Allfree Metro "Some novels are crafted with such care that it seems a shame reviewers should get to paw them before readers have the chance to admire their intricacy... Ingeniously constructed narrative." -- Anthony Cummins Literary Review

Prizes: Shortlisted for Costa Novel Award 2014.

Author Biography: Evie Wyld is the author of one previous novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which was shortlisted for the Impac Prize, the Orange Award for New Writers and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2011, she was named by the BBC as one of the twelve best new British novelists and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.