Birding

In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.

'Dark, poetic, elegiac, thought-provoking and desperately sad - a masterclass in hauntology' Stu Hennigan
I wish I could write as vividly and wisely as Rose Ruane. A beautiful book full of stark truths about relationships and self, framed in poetry and underscored by perfect analogies that had me nodding along in recognition throughout. The physical world of the book is alive and the internal worlds of the characters are deeply felt, as we are invited into their darkest thoughts and feelings and, in a way, asked to consider and process ourselves. Lyrical and evocative, highly recommended Evie King, author of Ashes to Admin
I have GULPED this novel down over the last couple of days. Birding gave me everything I want in a novel, including a massive, cathartic cry at the end. Achingly poignant, yet ultimately hopeful, with a worn out seaside town I can see so clearly -- Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things (via X)
I've had my socks absolutely knocked off (again) by Rose Ruane's latest novel Birding. It made me rage, reflect, howl with laughing, worry and blub. Gentle, strong, important and hopeful. I am in awe and couldn't recommend it more highly -- Jessica Fostekew (via X)
This unusual, uncomfortable novel is beautifully written Daily Mail
Fine, fierce... [an] empathetic, emotional reckoning Mail on Sunday
'Rose Ruane's second novel is like a memory box filled with sepia Polaroids and letters and trinkets... often funny, more often heartbreaking, but ultimately, cosmically hopeful... Birding is a novel for anyone who has ever asked themselves, "who am I?" or "am I enough?"' Snack Magazine
'The reader is always rooting for these women as they each arrive at their moments of reckoning... Birding is a sharp analysis of societal, gender and relationship expectations and the unnecessary harm they can inflict... While the subject matter could be depressing, Ruane's playful sense of humour adds plenty of levity resulting in a surprisingly moving and uplifting book that asks what it means to fully become ourselves' Irish Times

Rose Ruane is an author and artist who lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collection of Twentieth Century kitsch.

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