Description

‘Part memoir, part beginner’s guide, part self-help, but wholly wonderful book … It’s a real treat to read these nuggets of winged wisdom’ MAIL ON SUNDAY

‘A small masterpiece, written with heart, self-belief and wisdom. Wonderful!’ PAUL THEROUX

A true story of Bird and writer Candida Meyrick, set on Anglesey – and a fable for us all to find a way to fly.

The twelve-week-old Harris Hawk, Sophia Houdini Whitewing – aka Bird – is trained over the following months by the author and her children to be most herself: a skilled hunter and dazzling aerial gymnast, whose flights enrapture the family and set the author on a deepening love affair with life on the wing.

Working with her Harris Hawk over the following years reveals a new world: confronting mortality daily, moving through a liminal landscape, part sky-, part earth-bound. And every day’s hunting brings a new life-lesson. Bird opens up a way of being that is everything the author most longs to be: courageous, compassionate, independent, full of joy – free as a bird.

Be More Bird charts this deepening relationship between bird and woman, set in one of Britain’s wildest landscapes. It reveals the subtle dynamic possible between human and bird, illuminating the ancient, worldwide art of falconry and its urgent relevance for the modern mind: the importance of untethering our souls and belief-systems and re-establishing a connection with the wilder world.

Structured around a series of ‘life lessons’, Be More Bird transports readers into the wildness hidden within themselves and to think profoundly about our connections with nature and our lives.

Be More Bird is a true story, still unfolding, of a wild predator who by choice flies in partnership with a woman as her earth-bound helper. Bird crosses boundaries: between species, cultures, sky and earth. In this way, Be More Bird is a fable for our times.

Dare to be more. Be more Bird.

Publisher Review

‘A small masterpiece, written with heart, self-belief and wisdom. Wonderful!’

Paul Theroux

‘Be More Bird is a beautiful, deeply thought-provoking book filled with lessons about nature, about our relationships with the natural world and with each other. Candida writes with great joy and humility. We learn about hawks in history, language and culture, about their role in society over millennia. This partnership, between woman and hawk, is one of equality, reciprocity and mutual understanding. Candida finds freedom in a wild creature who is feral but accepts friendship. Falconry, she writes, has the power to both tame and release the wild in us. Most enchanting of all, we feel Candida’s joy as she witnesses “the flow state of creation” that is Bird in flight’

Annie Worsley

‘As a long-term admirer of Candida Meyrick’s novels I’m delighted to see her returning to print with this subtle and beguiling memoir’

DJ Taylor

‘Candida Meyrick’s lyrical account of hunting daily with her hawk is a love song to the splendour and wildness, the fragility and interdependence of life’

Geraldine Bedell

PRAISE FOR CANDIDA’S PREVIOUS WRITING:

‘Candida Clark is an author of breathtaking talent She writes like an angel’

Irish Independent

‘A treat to be lingered over…[an] intense, and profound, pleasure’

Observer

‘A taut, meticulously structured novel… Clark does Elizabeth Bowen even better than Ian McEwan in his country-house novel, Atonement’

Time Out

‘Candida Clark is one of the most gifted and prolific novelists of her generation’

Guardian

‘Hauntingly beautiful [Candida Clark has] achieved something quite extraordinary a poetical thriller and what an ending’

Mavis Cheek

I don’t think I’ve ever read a better representation of…romantic love I wish I could do that…superb ‘

Tim Pears