Tor Udall’s first novel is a poetic exploration of those most difficult of topics, grief and love, against the backdrop of Kew Gardens.
Widowed Jonah wanders through the gardens, trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife, Audrey, and the reasons for her death.
There he meets Chloe, an artist who sketches the gardens and finds solace from unspoken pain in origami.
Also in the gardens amid the changing seasons are Harry, an elderly gardener with a passion for growing plants, and Milly, a child who seems to belong nowhere else.
Udall deftly leads the reader through the tangled web of relationships binding each of these four people to Audrey, whose own story comes to be revealed through her diaries.
A Thousand Paper Birds brings Kew Gardens, and the people who meet each other there, to life with vivid language, as the narrative shifts between the different threads of the story.
What emerges is a strange and unexpected story of death and its aftermath, which lingers in the mind long after you reach the last page.
