The London Pigeon Wars

There are Tariq and Emma, Tom and Karen, Kwesi, Freya, and Ami–city-dwelling thirty-somethingers whose youthful hopes and dreams have dissolved into failing careers, failing relationships, and failing health. And yet their dissatisfaction has scarcely occurred to them until the mythic Murray returns with his Murray fun and irritating ease with life. His reappearance makes them all remember how much fun they used to have and awakens in them old ambitions they thought were dead.

And as this weary group struggles with identity, morality, and the like, London’s pigeons, also somehow spurred on by Murray’s return, are having an identity crisis all their own–suddenly conscious of moments and matters that were once unremarkable, just as they themselves were. The London Pigeon Wars –extraordinary, bizarre, moving and magical–is an assured novel of discontented stirrings, in both man and bird, that give way to wars within the self and without. Patrick Neate’s third novel is superbly written, brilliant, witty, and uproarious, securing for him a spot among the best of contemporary fiction writers.