Published By: Headline
Pages: 432
Released On: 14/03/2024
If you stood before sunrise in this wild old place, looking through the trees into the garden…
You’d see a father and son, a fox standing between them.
You wouldn’t know that Jack has returned from the city, still determined to be the opposite of his father. Or that Gerry would rather talk to animals than this angry man back under his roof.
You wouldn’t imagine that neither is quite who the other remembers. That someone irreplaceable is missing. That one conversation might change everything.
If you saw them in the small hours, you’d begin to piece together their story. It’s about connection and belonging – and how the world comes alive when you stop to take it in.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Headline for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I got on the hype train for Bobby’s first book, Isaac and the Egg. It wasn’t like anything I had read before and at times, just outrageously peculiar. But there was no denying his ability to write, and his ability to perfectly encapsulate raw human emotions, grief especially. And so I was right up there at the front of the queue with this one.
What I have noticed about Bobby’s writing over these two books, is he doesn’t just write a sentence as it is. It’s not just words on a page. Each word is thought about in the wider context, honed to perfection, which means every sentence tells of an emotion and a feeling as well as what it actually is saying. Which means his writing reads like poetry, it ebbs and flows and is a joy to read.
He takes every raw human emotion – grief, loss, sadness, stress – emotions that we aren’t always good at voicing, and managers to describe them 100% correctly, like of course that’s how it feels, it can’t possibly be any other way. He voices the words in your heart.
His books are about quite everyday things but with an added bizarre element, and there’s almost this musical quality about them. He talks about everything from loss and grief, love, employment issues, anger, aging, health, family, loves and passions, hatreds, and this sense of belonging or not belonging.
It’s got a very unique format which I think could have been too much, but he’s handled it very well and it really suits the unusual premise. We have the standard main POV which is of Jack, the rambling, seemingly disorganised POV of his father Gerry, and then occasionally the POV of the fox. It sounds bizarre when I write it like that but it really works. It’s set mainly in the present, but there are some flashbacks to the past, which threw me at first as it didn’t specific that, but once I got into it, it very quickly became the natural way to tell the story, and you get this real understanding of why the characters are the way they are.
I love Bobby’s writing about nature. There’s so much beauty in the everyday, even in the danger of mother nature, and it’s true that we don’t always appreciate it. We’re stuck in the busy cities, in the rat-race, going to work, earning money, and we forget about the world around us. But for me, this book is telling you to take a moment, close your eyes, and open up your ears and your soul to everything around you.
It’s very…insular. I know there’s this whole plot going on and whatnot. But for me, this is all about looking inwards. How are you feeling, how you feel about others, how you see each other and your place in the world, and that creates this sense of wonder in the reader.
Everything about this book, from the mundane to the fantastical, holds this power that really gets to you as you read it. It’s less wacky (and I use that word as a positive) than Isaac and the Egg, but no less fabulous and emotive.
I found myself sobbing. At the sad bits yes, but at the beautiful bits too. It is so tender and full of feeling. The love I had for this fictional fox and fictional family – they could be anyone’s family, anyone’s dad, brother, son. It was just gorgeous.
Books By Your Bedside 