An English Guide to Birdwatching - Softcover

Nicholas Royle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908434945 ISBN 13: 9781908434944

Publisher: Myriad Editions, 2017

Synopsis

Nicholas Royle's magnificent second novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a profound and deeply moving investigation into our relationship to birds (from bird-watching to bird mythology to endangered species), to each other and to the planet.

Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired from the business of undertaking to spend their twilight years by the sea but things are not as easy as they'd hoped, and it's all to do with herring gulls. Stephen Osmer and Lily Lynch are a glamorous young couple on the London literary scene. While Lily pursues an ambitious public art project about 'cinematic intentions', we encounter Osmer's brilliance as an arts journalist, writing a dangerously provocative essay about social justice and the banking crisis, as well as a diatribe about two people called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literary critic.

Did Royle, the literary critic, steal and publish a manuscript written by Silas Woodlock on the subject of 'Gulls'? With whom is Lily Lynch having a passionate affair? A midsummer party at a farmhouse by the sea provides the fateful climax.

Playfully commenting on this main story are 17 interlinked 'Hides', primarily about birds, bird photography and films (including Hitchcock's), ornithology and bird mythology. Like the birdwatcher's hut, these 'hides' afford a new outlook as well as a commentary on the themes that fly out of, or nestle within the novel: possession and betrayal, identity and mortality, and the dangers unleashed by desire and ambition.

At once comic and profound, this mischievous, inventive, word-juggling novel brims with joy at the transformative possibilities of language, but also shows extraordinary sensitivity to the messy business of being human and the fragility of the physical world we inhabit.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. As well as writing fiction, he has published numerous books about literature and literary criticism and theory. These include Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1991), Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1994, co-authored with Andrew Bennett), E. M. Forster (1999), The Uncanny (2003), Jacques Derrida (2003), How to Read Shakespeare (2005), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), This Thing Called Literature (2015, co-authored with Andrew Bennett) and Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th edition, 2016, co-authored with Andrew Bennett). All his writing is distinguished by playful language and linguistic invention. Despite their appearances, his 'academic' books contain unexpected interiors: Telepathy and Literature ends with a bizarre footnote comprising a short story called 'Telephoning Home'; The Uncanny incorporates several pieces of short fiction ('Exam', 'Chance Encounter', 'A Crowded After-Life'); Veering contains numerous embedded fictions and argues for a new conception of the relations between creative and critical writing. Royle is director of the Quick Fictions app and an editor of the Oxford Literary Review. He runs the popular MA programme in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex and is also a director of the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought.

Edition details

• Publisher: Myriad Editions
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908434945
• ISBN 13: 9781908434944
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320