\x27The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years\x27 Neil Gaiman\x27Wonderful \- I can\x27t recommend it too highly\x27 Helen Macdonald\x27One of those rare, enchanted books\x27 Isabella Tree\x27Beautiful \- it made me cry\x27 Simon Amstell\x27I was entranced\x27 Cathy RentzenbrinkThis is a story about birds and fathers.About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour\x27s life \- and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair... About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie\x27s biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night. It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one\x27s own. It is a story about change \- from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie\x27s nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.