Silas and Ethel Woodlock retire to spend their twilight years by the sea, only to find themselves traumatised by herring gulls. London journalist Stephen Osmer writes a provocative essay about two people called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literary critic. Whether Royle, the literary critic, is having an affair with the beautiful Lily Lynch, and has stolen and published Silas Woodlock's short story, Gulls, becomes a race to the death for at least one of the authors.
Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 'Hides': primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock's), these short texts give us a different view of the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.
Witty as well as erudite and delightful in its wordplay, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischief and post-modern (or 'post-fiction') sensibility, it celebrates the transformative possibilities of language and the mutability of the novel itself.
Nicholas Royle
is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. As well as writing fiction, he has published numerous books about literature and literary criticism and theory. These include Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1991), Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1994, co-authored with Andrew Bennett), E. M. Forster (1999), The Uncanny (2003), Jacques Derrida (2003), How to Read Shakespeare (2005), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), This Thing Called Literature (2015, co-authored with Andrew Bennett) and Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th edition, 2016, co-authored with Andrew Bennett).
All his writing is distinguished by playful language and linguistic invention. Despite their appearances, his 'academic' books contain unexpected interiors: Telepathy and Literature ends with a bizarre footnote comprising a short story called 'Telephoning Home'; The Uncanny incorporates several pieces of short fiction ('Exam', 'Chance Encounter', 'A Crowded After-Life'); Veering contains numerous embedded fictions and argues for a new conception of the relations between creative and critical writing.
Royle is director of the Quick Fictions app and an editor of the Oxford Literary Review. He runs the popular MA programme in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex and is also a director of the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought.
A page—turning novel about literary theft, adultery and ambition interwoven with a moving investigation into our relationship to birds.
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