There are two things we all know in life: that we once were born and that we one day will die. What happens in-between is up to us. 

We do not go through life alone but are accompanied by people we meet and who choose to chair our lives with us. 

Sometimes, they take the guise of passing strangers, at other times by people we think will be with us for our entire lifetime. 

When we meet and fall in love, it’s difficult to imagine that the relationship will ever end. However, all relationships eventually end, as life is not eternal. 

Everything is fleeting, everything changes.

When the wife of the narrator, and mother of his two children, die from a sudden fall, the author falls into a state of grief. 

The title of this novel is an obvious allusion to Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers”, but for the grieving widower, there is little hope to be found, as he tries to map out a life without his wife. 

An expert on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, the novel’s protagonist parallels his experiences with loss with the poetry of Hughes, who also appears in one scene, offering unexpected support to the young narrator. 

The protagonist is even writing on a book to be called Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis, pointing to the meta-levels and intertextual dimensions of this story. 

At times, the story is fragmented and poetic, similar to how grief is not linear but can appear as emotional pulsations for years after the loss. 

The linearity of life is a point of contention. 

Why is the life that once was shared now so definitely a part of a past that no one longer can access, save through memories? 

What will the boys’ childhood be without their mother? 

The story is more an internal, emotional one, put together like a bricolage, where fiction often overlaps with reality. Grief appears as a bird, following its own logic (invisible to others), coming and going, often making a mess, ruffling feathers and not caring of whether or not it is invited or not.