The latest addition to my website is Max Porter‘s Grief is the Thing With Feathers. This is a highly imaginative book about grief. Dad – we never know his name – has just lost his wife. It seems that she fell and hit her head. He is left with two young sons. He is visited by grief, in the form of a large, familiar but somewhat pushy crow. The book is divided into chapters, each one narrated in turn by Dad, the crow and the boys. Porter makes very creative use of fables and stories to illustrate both grief at the loss of a loved one and father-son relationships. We follow the story of how the father, in particular, but also his sons, adapt to their loss and the role of grief in the form of the very active crow. The crow image comes from Ted Hughes (Dad is writing a book about him and briefly met him once) and the title comes from Emily Dickinson.