My new book Birds and Ghosts is available via the wonderful publisher Linen Press, which is the only women’s press in the UK. It would be wonderful if you could support this publisher by ordering it direct from them here: linen-press.com/shop/birds-and-ghosts/
Here is what Linen Press say about Birds and Ghosts:
From the acclaimed author of Costa shortlisted Snake Ropes, Cooking with Bones and City of Circles.
How do you grieve for him, when you can’t visit his grave?
I grieve in the language of birds and ghosts.
Jess Richard’s beloved father died suddenly at the age of sixty-seven in Scotland. Three months later, she travelled to Aotearoa, New Zealand, to a new relationship. This is the story of her grief and her love, of a place lost and a place found, of a memory-packed past and a poised present.
Birds and Ghosts was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when international travel was impossible. In this achingly empty space, away from her mother and her father’s grave, Jess reconstructs her early life and ponders the self who is lonely, different, and invisible. A late diagnosis of Autism adds a conventional label to a uniquely personal portrait.
This intimate story edges the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, confident in its experimental style. It is memoir in a pure, unconstrained form, brave and beautiful, moving and utterly compelling.
“Birds and Ghosts blurs and transcends the borders between life and death, poetry and prose, drawing and language. Tracing the arc of grief, Richards reveals how loss opens us into a deeper truth of love.
– Diane Comer, author of The Braided River: Migration and the Personal Essay