I'm slowly working my way through the 2011 Booker Long List (link below), and I'm currently halfway through Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie (think Life of Pi + The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet). It's one of those books that makes your television so very easy to ignore, and that makes you wish that someone finally, finally, invented the never-ending novel. It's that good. I'll have a full review when I'm finished.
"This got us onto the subject of Jamrach's and how I worked there in the yard, and all the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was all wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage. "It's something to do with the wings," he said. "It's when they can't open them up."
We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was."
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1514
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