 | The Flight of Birds : A Novel in Twelve Stories Shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2019 Shortlisted for the Mascara Literary Review's Avant Garde Awards 2020 The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds: A Novel in Twelve Stories explores what happens when the two worlds meet. Joshua Lobb's stories are at once intimate and expansive, grounded in an exquisite sense of place. The birds in these stories are variously free and wild, native and exotic, friendly and hostile. Humans see some of them as pets, some of them as pests, and some of them as food. Through a series of encounters between birds and humans, the book unfolds as a meditation on grief and loss, isolation and depression, and the momentary connections that sustain us through them. Underpinning these interactions is an awareness of climate change, of the violence we do to the living beings around us, and of the possibility of transformation. The Flight of Birds will change how you think about the planet and humanity's place in it. Joshua Lobb is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong. His award-winning short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories , The Bridport Anthology , Southerly , Text , and Animal Studies Journal . In 2014 he won the LitLink Unpublished Manuscript Award, awarded by the Byron Writers Festival and the Varuna Writers' House. |
