Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson
Granta, £16.99 Buy the book here

Chicken (full name Madame Chickeboumskaya, called after an American drag queen) is a rook found as a fledgeling and raised by Esther Woolfson. Quite what their relationship is, Woolfson is not absolutely sure: certainly they don't own one another. Chicken is a complex character, though no more and no less so than the rest of the family of kenspeckle birds she lives with. In a humorously poetic voice Woolfson discusses the natural history, science and mythology of birds, of corvids in particular and the condition of her own life at home and in the wild with birds in Scotland.

The Jive Talker, or How to get a British Passport by Samson Kambalu
Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Buy the book here

In memoir as in life, the voice is everything: if the eyes are the windows of the soul, the voice is the door to the logos. Walk in and take the full guided tour (with stereophonic audio effects) of Kambalu's early life in Malawi where, through the media of fashion, football, his father, free education at the Kamuzu Academy, books (science, philosophy, English language classics) and girls, he compiled his primary character as the originator of “Holyballism” (examples given) and his career as a conceptual artist. Life wasn't an idyll, but it was largely ideal. Read Kambalu, cry, clap your hands.

Death and the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered by David Ellis
OUP, £20 Buy the book here

Henry James, after the stroke before the one that killed him, said: “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.” James died mentally confused, metaphorically all at sea; but Lawrence was lucid until his tubercular end. Writers die like anyone else, but how they face death - well or badly - may give cues to the rest of us looking for examples of mortality looked in the eye or etiquettes of dying. Ellis has a fine, mordant sense of humour that plays eloquently with the theme of consumption, that knell also of Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka and Chekhov.

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