All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

It feels as though Evie Wyld may be writing the kind of novel series that is tied together not by recurring characters or plots, but by landscapes, themes and structures. All the Birds, Singing is her second book and, like her first, it deals with the vastness of the Australian outback, relationships at the core of largely male-dominated worlds, and the effects of time on traumatic events.

We meet Jake as she is being confronted by the fact someone at the sheep farm where she works knows the hidden truths of her past and is threatening to expose her. From there this strand of chapters moves chronologically backwards, peeling off layers of a tragic history, through the terrible events that shattered her childhood and hardened her soul. Alternating chapters take place at a later date, with Jake now running her own sheep farm on an English island and trying to deal with the ghosts of her past.

All the Birds, Singing is written in measured, poetic prose, rich with descriptions of nature and almost mythic in its otherworldly moments. The characters that revolve around Jake are fully realised, but it is the gradual reveal of how a naïve young girl became a woman stalked by fear and uncertainty that truly gives the novel its power. [Ryan Rushton]