As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books

By Alex Preston and Neil Gower Corsair, £25

Alex Preston is best known as a novelist, but he has spent most of his life enthralled by birds. Over a quarter of a century he has compiled exhaustive notes detailing his many avian encounters, all the while looking for references to birds in works of literature. Ted Hughes features prominently here, as Preston pilots the reader from the gulls and starlings of his youth to the coal-black crows that now deepen his understanding of mortality. Illustrated by the graphic artist Neil Gower, this book ultimately succeeds where it fails; despite such intense lifelong study, both Preston and his literary forebears must admit defeat in their quest to confine the immutable bird forever to the page. ■