Talking Location With … Sophie Morton-Thomas – NORFOLK
Five Great Books featuring a PARROT
29th November 2022
We found ourselves discussing books that have a parrot at their heart, over on Twitter. It started with a discussion about The Birdcage and gradually the conversation evolved, with several tweets back and forth – especially with @exmoorjane (do give the account a follow). Surprisingly, several contributors Here is a short list and of course if you have further titles to add to the list, please leave a comment below! Five great books featuring a parrot.
The Birdcage by Eve Chase
When half-sisters Lauren, Flora, and Kat are unexpectedly summoned to the Cornish house where they spent their childhood summers, it’s the first time they’ve dared return.
Because the wild cliffs and windswept beaches hide a twenty-year-old secret.
The truth about what they did.
Someone who remembers them lurks in the shadows, watching their every move.
And there are other secrets, even darker than their own, waiting to be unearthed . . .
Odesa At Dawn by Sally McGrane
Ex-CIA man Max Rushmore travels to a still-peaceful Odesa on routine assignment. But things veer off course when the severed hand of the local governor shows up in a vat of sunflower oil. Max stumbles across a solitary toe, with the same tell-tale markings. The downsized professional can’t help himself – he has to investigate.
With the Russian threat in the background, Max’s quest takes him down to the crumbling underbelly of the beautiful Black Sea port city, once the Russian Empire’s glittering third capital. It leads him to dubious businessmen, corrupt officials, catacomb dwellers, scientists, pastry-chefs, poets, archivists, cops – and killers.
As global political tensions rise, Max begins to untangle the threads of the case. But he is also being tracked – and not just by Odesa’s network of mafia-minded stray cats, who may be the only ones who really know what’s going on.
In this surreal contemporary spin on the classic spy thriller, Sally McGrane pays tribute to one-time Odesa residents like Babel, Gogol, Pushkin and Chekhov, creating a darkly witty, beguiling and bizarre work of fiction like nothing before.
Still Life by Sarah Winman
1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening.
Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.
Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses’ mind that will shape the trajectory of his life – and of those who love him – for the next four decades.
Moving from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London’s East End, Still Life is a sweeping, joyful novel about beauty, love, family and fate.
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
A brilliant reworking of the detective story by the much-acclaimed Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’, Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of comic books, intertwining history, legend and storytelling verve. In ‘The Final Solution’ he has crafted a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic 19th-century detective story.
In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year-old man, vaguely remembered by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with other people. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African grey parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out – a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case – the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot – beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?
Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Flaubert’s Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert’s Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.
BONUS BOOKS
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
When a mysterious sailor dies in sinister circumstances at the Admiral Benbow inn, young Jim Hawkins stumbles across a treasure map among the dead man’s possessions. But Jim soon becomes only too aware that he is not the only one who knows of the map’s existence, and his bravery and cunning are tested to the full when, with his friends Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey, he sets sail in the Hispaniola to track down the treasure. With its swift-moving plot and memorably drawn characters – Blind Pew and Black Dog, the castaway Ben Gunn and the charming but dangerous Long John Silver – Stevenson’s tale of pirates, treachery and heroism was an immediate success when it was first published in 1883 and has retained its place as one of the greatest of all adventure stories.
In his introduction John Seelye examines Stevenson’s life and influences and the novel’s place within adventure fiction. This edition also includes Stevenson’s essay on the composition of Treasure Island.
The House of One Hundred Clocks by A M Howell
[MG Children]
JUNE, 1905.
Helena and her parrot, Orbit, are swept off to Cambridge when her father is appointed clock-winder to one of the wealthiest men in England. There is only one rule: the clocks must never stop.
But Helena discovers the house of one hundred clocks holds many mysteries; a ghostly figure, strange notes and disappearing winding keys Can she work out its secrets before time runs out?
Can you think of any more titles featuring a parrot?
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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