Jackdaw Summer

‘Plese look after her rite. This is a childe of god’ reads the note attached to the blanket wrapped round the abandoned baby. Has she really been saved by the jackdaw that seemed to be leading Max and Liam to her? Liam’s novelist father used to say that truth and fiction merge but now, as the television screens are full of images of bombed villages, screaming people and corpses in blood stained rubble, the mysterious nature of story, in particular its relation to reality, appears more complex and disturbing.

Nattrass was once Liam’s friend but now his behaviour is edgy and threatening. He has persuaded an art gallery to display his video installation that mimics the horrific executions of hostages in Iraq using a pig’s head and bodies of straw. Is this art, politics or the acting out of intolerable internal disturbance? And then there’s Oliver, the foster child who may be sent back to Liberia. Was he a victim or an aggressor during the bloody civil war that raged there?

In this multi-layered, multi-faceted novel Almond challenges the reader to consider their own capacity for violence. Narrated in the first person by Liam, the spare, emotionally powerful prose also hints at underlying family dramas of which Liam is sensitively aware. Surprisingly, this is not a bleak novel despite its unflinching gaze at the contemporary world. The foundling ‘childe of god’ is warmly taken in by Liam’s family and hope is thus engendered for the foundling that is in us all.