“Human ashes look just how you’d imagine them to look – somewhere between the contents of an ashtray and the surface of the moon.”
Rozie Kelly’s Kingfisher (Saraband 2025) is a beautifully heartbreaking novel where everything is messy, life hurts, but there are birds and poetry. You’ve likely read before how I typically don’t like books about creative writing academics / scholars; Kingfisher is special.
The novel follows a creative writing academic who finds himself smitten with a colleague – the poet. Not only is the poet older than him, the poet is a woman, making her an interesting choice for his affections. His partner, Michael, has fully embraced their open relationship, but our narrator hasn’t. Not until the poet. Things are messy and brilliant.
Meanwhile, the narrator is trying to set boundaries with his homophobic mother while coming to terms with some of the hardness of his childhood and the impact of the loss of his dad at a young age.
The novel is about grief, loss, and letting go. But it’s also about love, the importance of both give and take in relationships, and finding the people who see you as you are and let you be. And the birds. It’s about the birds.
I really loved this novel and see why it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.
A Girl Named Tommi 