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As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Books & Birds – review

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Alex Preston’s literary compendium of birds, illustrated by Neil Gower, is a sumptuous labour of love

“It’s not quite the book I meant to write, but then, as Iris Murdoch said, ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.’” Alex Preston is either being very hard on himself or disingenuous if he is suggesting that As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a “wreck”. The award-winning novelist, author of This Bleeding City, The Revelations and In Love and War has sheared away from fiction to collaborate with the deservedly acclaimed artist Neil Gower in making an object of thrilling beauty. In the words of its editor, James Gurbutt of Corsair, “We want to make this the most beautiful book of 2017.”

As Kingfishers Catch Fire was inspired, in part, by a “bird memoir” written in the late 1920s by Edward Grey, who in addition to being Preston’s great-great-uncle was Britain’s longest serving foreign secretary in the years leading up to, and into, the first world war. “The Charm of Birds was a record of his life, smuggled into a bird book,” writes Preston. In this respect, As Kingfishers Catch Fire shares a familial relationship with Dan Richards’s energetic Climbing Days and James Macdonald Lockhart’s elegant Raptor in revisiting the work [and in the cases of Richards and Macdonald Lockhart, the footsteps] of illustrious and impressive forebears.

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