GO AWAY BIRDS

274pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2021

After a traumatic experience Skye finds herself at a crisis point in her life, and returns to her childhood home to confront her past.

“This finely observed novel is about connections – the kind we make in person and the kind that bind us to our past. It is about the power of personal responsibility to navigate both of these. It absorbed me deeply. I couldn’t put it down.” Fiona Snyckers, author of The School Gates

“I read Go Away Birds in one greedy gulp. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t appreciate the carefully nuanced writing and the sensitivity Michelle Edwards brings to the conflict we deal with in our personal lives, and our political and social ones too. Who really knows what goes on behind the closed doors of neighbours and friends? Who knows what we tell ourselves, simply to keep on going? With conflict comes tension, the bizarre, the revelatory. Michelle Edwards juggles all of this, and so much more, in one glorious, messy and very human story.” Máire Fisher, author of Birdseye