Grief has feathers5/20/2023 ![]() ![]() Described by its publisher Faber & Faber as “part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief”, it uses three interwoven narratives told from different perspectives – those of a father, his sons and a crow that arrives at their front door in the dead of night – to guide its characters from a moment of deep mourning into a more hopeful future. It’s a novel that, when it was released in 2015, was praised by the British literary press for its striking treatment of death and the unconventional structure of its prose. Untethered imagination and finding solace in the impossible when death affects you is something that strikes through the heart of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Featherstoo. Following the sudden departure of my childhood matriarch, my mind was starting to play tricks on me. One part of me thinks it was a disorienting fever dream, but another, one that gets more convincing the more I dwell on it, thinks it stemmed from somewhere deeper and psychological. Aged eight, I was lying in bed, staring at the walls of my bedroom and imagining things that weren’t there: kitchen cupboards floating footballs birds. I still remember a bout of sickness I had shortly after my mother’s death 16 years ago. ![]()
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