Portrait of Evie Wyld
Website
http://www.eviewyld.com/
Winning Book Image
All the Birds, Singing

Evie Wyld is the author of one previous novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award, the Orange Award for New Writers and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2013, she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, having previously been named by the BBC as one of the 12 best new British writers. All the Birds, Singing was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in Peckham, London, where she runs the Review Bookshop.

EUPL Year
EUPL Country
All the Birds, Singing (Tous les oiseaux du ciel)
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaving it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colours and sounds, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

Agent / Rights Director

lr@watsonlittle.com
Laetitia Rutherford
+44 20 7388 7529

Publishing House

Translation Deals

Translation Deals
  • Albania: Morava
  • Australia: Random House
  • Brazil: Dark Side
  • Bulgaria: Persei
  • Croatia: Naklava Ljevak
  • Czechia: Omega
  • Finland: Tammi
  • France: Actes Sud
  • Georgia: Agora
  • Hungary: Metropolis
  • Iceland: Bokautgafan Bjartur
  • Italy: Safara
  • Lithuania: Alma Littera
  • Netherlands: De Geus
  • North Macedonia: Bata Press
  • Norway:  Alle fuglene synger
  • Portugal: Jacarandá Editora
  • Serbia: Dereta
  • Slovenia: KUD Sodobnost International
  • Spain: Futurbox Project SL
  • Turkey: Yabanci
  • United Kingdom & Canada: Jonathan Cape
  • USA: Pantheon

Excerpt

Excerpt

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down into the woolshed.

I’d been up that morning, before the light came through, out there, talking to myself, telling the dog about the things that needed doing as the blackbirds in the hawthorn started up. Like a mad woman, listening to her own voice, the wind shoving it back down my throat and hooting over my open mouth like it had done every morning since I moved to the island. With the trees rattling in the copse and the sheep blaring out behind me, the same trees, the same wind and sheep.

That made two deaths in a month. The rain started to come down, and a sudden gust of wind flung sheep shit at the back of my neck so it stung. I pulled up my collar and shielded my eyes with my hand.

Cree-cra, cold, cree-cra, cold.

‘What are you laughing at?’ I shouted at the crows and lobbed a stone at them. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and breathed in and out heavily to get rid of the blood smell. The crows were silent. When I turned to look, five of them sat in a row on the same branch, eyeing me but not speaking. The wind blew my hair in my eyes.

The farm shop at Marling had a warped and faded sign at the foot of its gate that read FREE BABY GUINEA PIGS. There was never any trace of the free guinea pigs and I had passed the point of being able to ask. The pale daughter of the owner was there, doing a crossword. She looked up at me, then looked back down like she was embarrassed.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She blushed but gave me the smallest of acknowledgements. She wore a thick green tracksuit and her hair was in a ponytail. Around her eyes was the faint redness that came after a night of crying or drinking.

Supporting Document
Attachment Size
EUPL_WB_2014_Evie_Wyld.pdf 991.46 KB