The Flight of Birds: A Novel in Twelve Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds explores what happens when the two worlds meet.

Joshua Lobb's stories are at once intimate and expansive, grounded in an exquisite sense of place. The birds in these stories are variously free and wild, native and exotic, friendly and hostile. Humans see some of them as pets, some of them as pests, and some of them as food. Through a series of encounters between birds and humans, the book unfolds as a meditation on grief and loss, isolation and depression, and the momentary connections that sustain us through them. Underpinning these interactions is an awareness of climate change, of the violence we do to the living beings around us, and of the possibility of transformation.

The Flight of Birds will change how you think about the planet and humanity's place in it.

Reviews

'The Flight of Birds is full of surprises, as if Lobb is saying to the reader, dont get stuck in the routine of traditional storytelling, come fly with me somewhere dangerous, somewhere fun. I dare you.'

'Its a deeply thoughtful (and yet often light-hearted and amusing) book about the ethical compromises humans make to justify their relationship with animals. Lobbs novel comes from a different place because it is
also a meditation on loss and loneliness, but it shares the same preoccupation with the way we share the same spaces as animals but see ourselves as apart.'

'Lobb's substantial achievement has been to create a cohesive whole in which the parts flow and the patterns resonate. Interlocking and open-ended, the stories are rich with fragments from poems and other texts ... The Flight of Birds creates space for the consciousness of both humans and birds.'

Author Bio

Joshua Lobb is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong. His award-winning short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Bridport Anthology, Southerly, Text, and Animal Studies Journal. In 2014 he won the LitLink Unpublished Manuscript Award, awarded by the Byron Writers Festival and the Varuna Writers' House.