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  • Published: 1 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781742757315
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

All the Birds, Singing




Winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award

Winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award

Who or what is watching Jake Whyte from the woods?

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

Set between Australia and a remote English island, All the Birds, Singing is the story of one how one woman’s present comes from a terrible past. It is the second novel from the award-winning author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice.

  • Published: 1 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781742757315
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Evie Wyld

Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and the UK. She is part owner of Review, a small independent bookshop in London. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 she was listed as one of the Culture Show’s Best New British Novelists. She was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 she was listed as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Evie’s second novel, All the Birds, Singing, was published in 2013. It won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award, the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and was longlisted for the 2014 Stella Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the 2021 Stella Prize. Her graphic novel with illustrator Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth, was published in 2015.

Also by Evie Wyld

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Praise for All the Birds, Singing

Evie Wyld is the real thing… this one is terrific. [Her] two books are quite as good as Ian McEwan’s early fiction. Expect to hear her name often from now on.

The Spectator, (UK)

There’s a precision and power to her sentences that feels like the work of a much older writer. Her new book reminds me of Peter Carey: the language becomes part of the landscape and you don’t feel an authorial self pressing down on the novel, but a deep authorial intelligence behind it.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won’t only root for Jake, you’ll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling.

The New York Times

Extraordinarily accomplished, one of those books that tears around in your cerebellum like a dark firework, and which, upon finishing, you immediately want to pick up again.

The Financial Times

Wyld is shaping up into a name to watch … her second novel is unsettling, dark and extraordinarily fresh. Can’t wait to read more.

The Times

Awards & recognition

Miles Franklin Award

Winner  •  2014  •  Miles Franklin Award