These Glass Bodies

'Stunning. Moving, elegant, important, Rebecca Hooper is a voice that must be heard' Bonnie Garmus, international bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

Tender and exquisitely crafted, THESE GLASS BODIES is an absorbing, unsettling debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world.

It is the warmest spring anyone can remember. Anna lives with her father near the ocean in Scotland. She spends her time hand-rearing nestlings from the wild and has never felt more at peace than in Invergrian, with her birds and her woods and her work.

Rory, eleven years old, hasn't spoken a word for five years, not since his mother Pip left him and his father Angus. But when he stumbles upon Anna's house of birds, he can't believe his luck. He's long believed birds to be magic, and Anna seems happy to teach him how to help them, not questioning his silence. Seeing his son so happy with the birds and with the beautiful and enigmatic Anna, Angus too finds the fog he has been immersed in finally start to lift.

But as the spring burns on, amid the quiet work of saving the nestlings, alarm bells start ringing. Water becomes scarce. The elderly in the town become fearful. Exhausted birds start falling out of the sky. And Anna discovers a body washed up on the shore.