BIRD COTTAGE

(Pushkin £12.99, 256 pp) ECCENTRIC amateur ornithologist Gwendolen ( Len) Howard was a bestselling author in the Fifties, producing two now-forgotten accounts of the wild birds with which she lived shoulder to wing-tip in her small Sussex cottage.

Drawing on the little that’s known of her personal life, Eva Meijer has produced a truly original novel, following the musically gifted Len’s journey from her bohemian childhood in Somerset to London, where she joins a successful orchestra.

But it’s birds that are her real passion and, disappointed in love and stifled by the city, she decides to devote her life to studying their ways.

There’s a sense of birdlike lightness and agility about this episodic, elliptical novel, yet throughout, Meijer inhabits her central character sensitively, delicately conveying Len’s inner turbulence and the upheavals of the first half of the last century.