Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

NATURETHIS BOOK SHOULD not work, but it does, marvellously well too. Esther Woolfson's happily eccentric memoir of domestic life with crows dances on a high wire over a landscape dotted with literary pitfalls. Sentimentality, pedantry, self-indulgence, prolixity of sentence and structure lie beneath every step she takes. She wobbles more than once, but still gives an exhilarating performance. In the end, the wire falls away and, like the birds she loves so passionately but with such clear vision, she flies.

This is a woman with two families in the one house. The humans - a husband, children, a grandchild - don't get much of a profile in this account. Happily, they seem to share the author's own joy in the company of birds. Their large granite house in Aberdeen is also home to a random collection that has, over many years, included rooks, a magpie, a company of doves, a handful of parrots and, most recently, a crow called Ziki.