What I know now.

1. I cried. How can one not cry all the way through a book about two small boys whose mother has died?
2. Grief shifts. It is different every time and still the same, over and over again, through centuries and nations. We all feel grief, it seems never ending, and yet we travel through its depths until it becomes less consuming, still present. We move on, we are never the same.
3. I don’t know enough about Ted Hughes. Or crows. Or Ted Hughes and Crow.
4. That Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a gut wrenching, understated, sideways examination of loss.
5. And I want to know what Max Porter is going to write next. Because the thing about throwing out conventions and sneaking up on story so it builds and twines between pages from different points of view, is that it is a hard thing to follow.

Buy Grief is the Thing with Feathers for around £7 … or do the sensible thing that Amazon suggests and invest in Ted Hughes’ Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow too.