Grief Is The Thing With Feathers – Max Porter

Another Monday, another novel finished on my commute. This is our Pick Of The Week at work, and as it’s been sitting on my shelf since I bought it in September, I thought that was the perfect nudge to get me to get round to reading it.

I expected something bleak, but beautiful. What I got was honesty, and the surreal, grotesque nature of life after a death, where things shouldn’t be funny but are, where nothing makes sense, where a smile feels like betrayal but we do it anyway. It’s not quite poetry, not quite prose, not really an essay or a story but not not, either. It’s gorgeously coherently disjointed, with multiple narrators and points of view. It’s funny, and strangely light, and beautiful. I haven’t read Ted Hughes’ Crow – I haven’t read Ted Hughes at all, beyond the odd poem in a collection, but I’m intimidated by poetry so that’s not really surprising – but that didn’t matter, I enjoyed it, I will re-read it, I will have weird nonsensical conversations about it with people who have read it, too.