'One of the best books I have ever read. Incredibly moving' Elton John'I cant recommend it too highly' Helen Macdonald'Ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs' Sunday Times'Where Helen Macdonald's H Is For Hawk meets Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals ... Remarkable' Daily Mail'Beautiful, wise, compassionate and powerful' Isabella TreeThis is a story about birds and fathers.About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair... About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own. It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie. '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 personal reckoning which is simultaneously brutal and joyous. I was entranced' Cathy Rentzenbrink'A beautiful book - it made me cry' Simon Amstell