How often can you say a book is like nothing you have ever read before? Well, Birds Art Life Death is exactly that for me.
Every paragraph, every sentence, every word, even, of Kyo Maclear’s memoir felt like it had been carefully, and maybe painstakingly, selected – and the result is...perfection.
The title suggests big themes but, in fact, it is lots of small but sometimes spine-tinglingly significant observations – all linked together by the author’s quest to understand bird watching (or at least that's how I read it).
From the first page, it made me sit up straighter as I already sensed that I did not want to miss a single thing.
It is about birds, of course, but with a more philosophical approach – it’s more a field guide for life than ornithology. Every so often there is a beautiful illustration, not just of birds, which fits with the general quirkiness of the book.
It spoke to me on so many levels; as a writer, as a woman, as a daughter, as a mother and, yes, as someone who likes watching birds.

Here’s the blurb:
One winter, Kyo Maclear became unmoored. Her father had recently fallen ill and she suddenly found herself lost for words. As a writer, she could no longer bring herself to create; her work wasn’t providing the comfort and meaning that it had before.
But then Kyo met a musician who loved birds. The musician felt he could not always cope with the pressures and disappointments of being an artist in a big city. When he watched birds and began to photograph them, his worries dissipated. Intrigued, Kyo found herself following the musician for a year, accompanying him on his birdwatching expeditions; the sounds of birds in the city reminded them both to look outwards at the world.
Intricate and delicate as birdsong, Birds Art Life Death asks how our passions shape and nurture us, and how we might gain perspective, overcome our anxieties and begin to cherish the urban wild spaces where so many of us live.

This is the first time I have read anything by Kyo Maclear, an essayist, novelist and children’s author who lives in Canada, but it won’t be the last.
There were so many almost lightbulb moments that I made use of the Kindle’s highlighter option for the first time – and I will be re-reading this one again.
I actually wrote several paragraphs on pieces of paper and stuck them to my wall.
After I had finished the book, I was left feeling peaceful, yet inspired, so inspired I could feel it in my chest like a sort of nervous energy.
I can only hope the author’s journey has made her feel the same.

With thanks to Fourth Estate (via NetGalley) for the ARC in return for an honest review.

A gentle, maybe whimsical contemplation of birding that grows on her, as a way of harnessing thoughts about her father's illness - daughter of a war correspondent and a Japanese mother - she hits on birding as a sort of diversion but also a way of focussing the underlying worry and fear of the future as her father becomes more ill. Her husband seems to be an artist - whose studio she finds relaxing as she works. She contacts a musician who has been watching birds and nurturing them for years - originally from similar impetus. There is no sense that she falls for him but only that she falls for birds. A sweet book, actually laced with a kind of grief or anticipated fear of losing (which she describes well) - lovely writing and it is moving and gripping at same time. I felt like giving it to my sister who has just suffered a loss. (I am not persuaded that birding is the way forward for me, though...) -

A contemplative read, that defies a genre really, part family memoir, part factuall documentary .Filled with avian imagery, rife with colour, where fact and emotion are cleverly amalgamated.

At a time when everything is right here, right now this book slows things down and lets you breath.
Just observe things around you, there really is no hurry.
This was a beautifully written non-fiction book about the joys of nature and embracing life as it is. I found it particularly poignant. Quirky and interesting, this book will go a long way.

This was a beautiful book which I shall re-read more slowly. It is a short text of reflections and reminiscences (a 'sketch-book' as the author decides to call it) where the text is interspersed with and supported by photographs and small line drawings. The book is organised chronologically over a year of bird-watching in Toronto but this is not an ornithologist's handbook. The author relates her bird-watching activity to philosophical musings on her life and family but does this in a well written and enticing way, citing other birdwatchers through history. Her father and sons play a large part in her musings, her husband and mother less so. Through the year she is guided in her bird-watching by a musician friend. She writes poetically and indeed refers to many modern North American poets. In places her work reminds me of Walt Whitman with her lists. I would recommend this book to poetry lovers as well as to lovers of literary writing in general.