Less than a week after the sudden death of his wife, a grieving man opens his front door to a giant crow who scoops him up into his wing and tells him: “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.” Still in shock, the man is facing the prospect of raising his two young sons alone. The bird, which has previously been roaming around the family’s flat at night, has observed a household of “heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly covered in a film of grief”. In that first visit, the man “woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma”.
First published in 2015 and since adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is an inventive and sharply observed novella by Max Porter which uses verse, dialogue and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who had been “busy living, and then she was gone”. In a story that shifts between the perspectives of “Dad”, “Boys” and “Crow”, we learn the man is a writer who is working on a book about the poet Ted Hughes called Crow on the Couch.
This is a new recording with Russell Tovey as narrator. Deftly navigating the book’s shapeshifting, fragmented style, the actor delivers a bravura performance in which he crackles with compassion and menace as the crow and movingly captures the devastation of the dad who notes how “moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush.”
Available via Faber, 1hr 52min
Further listening
White Male Stand-Up
Alan Davies, Monoray, 10hr 52min
Davies’s follow-up to Just Ignore Him, his memoir detailing his experiences of childhood abuse, shifts focus to his career, from the 1990s standup circuit to TV series including Jonathan Creek and QI. Read by the author.
The Wren, the Wren
Anne Enright, Vintage Digital, 7hr 40min
Enright plus narrators Aoife Duffin, Owen Roe and Liza Ross read this moving multigenerational tale about a mother and daughter forced to reckon with the historical actions of a philandering relative.
