In 2019, Hamilton became convinced that the therapeutic “slow trot” of cricket’s sparsely attended but charmingly nuanced county championship was at the point of unwelcome change, with the new white-ball competition the Hundred about to trample all over it.
The plotting itself has less mystery, but Arnott writes vibrantly about the harsh wonder of nature, his vivid characters becoming almost animal themselves. Against this mythic backdrop, a survival thriller emerges as a soldier with a troubled upbringing goes on a mission in the dark forest to deliver the bird to her paymasters. A quietly unsettling fable set in a country beset by ecological, political and economic difficulty, the titular shape-shifting bird in Arnott’s second novel acts as a cipher for humankind’s inexorable struggle to tame the natural world.
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