Non-Fiction

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
Longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018

'A beautiful book; wise and sharp-eared as its subject' – Robert Macfarlane
'Captivating' – The Times
'Achingly beautiful' – Guardian
'Vivid and engaging' – Sunday Times

‘Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty. She turned her face towards me. There is a narrow area that falls between pleasing and preposterous, and this owl’s circular face and bright yellow eyes fitted into it with perfect grace...'

Owls have captivated the human imagination for millennia. We have fixated on this night hunter as predator, messenger, emblem of wisdom or portent of doom. In Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington sets out to tell a new story.

Her fieldwork begins with wild encounters in the British Isles, on the owl walks she takes with her teenage son Benji. From here, Darlington seeks to identify every European species of this charismatic and elusive bird, on a journey that will take her from southern Spain through France, Serbia and Finland, and to the frosted borders of the Arctic.

Along the way, however, Benji succumbs to a mysterious and disabling illness, and her owl quest soon becomes entangled with the search for his cure.

Owl Sense is a book about the wild in nature and in the unpredictable course of our human lives. In her watching and deep listening to owls in the natural world, Darlington cleaves myth from reality and brings the strangeness and magnificence of these creatures to life.

Claude Debussy was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. He is the modernist everyone loves. How did he manage this? Was it through the association of his music with visual images, or was it simply that, by throwing out the rule book of the Paris Conservatoire where he studied, his music put beauty of sound above the spiritual ambitions of the German tradition from which those rules derived.
Stephen Walsh’s thought-provoking biography, told partly through the events of Debussy’s life, and partly through a critical discussion of his music, addresses these and other questions about one of the most influential composers of the early twentieth century.