Grief Is A Thing With Feathers By Max Porter review – a bravura rendering of death | Audio books

LA week after his wife’s sudden death, a grieving man opens his door to a large crow that carries him in its wings and tells him: “I will not leave until you no longer need me.” Still in fear, the man expects to raise his two sons alone. The bird, which used to wander around the family’s house at night, has seen a family “crying a lot, all the dead mothers, every crayon, tractor, shirt, and sad film”. On that first visit, the man “woke up and did not see me against the darkness of his pain”.

First published in 2015 and adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is a fictional and popular novel by the author. Max Porter which uses verse, dialogue and spirituality to explore a family dealing with the death of a wife and mother who was “busy with life, and then gone”. In a story that switches between the perspectives of “Father”, “Boys” and “Crow”, we learn that the man is a writer working on a novel by poet Ted Hughes called Crow on the Couch.

This is a new cartoon with Russell Tovey as the narrator. Looking at the way the book is changing, the distribution style, the actor plays with confidence how he sounds sympathetic and dangerous like a crow and touches deeply the damage of the father who sees that “travel, as an idea, is for stupid people, because every wise person knows that grief is temporary.

Available via Faber, 1hr 52min

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