The Flight of Birds

'Lobb's writing is at many points sparse and straightforward, and at others more pungent and poetic, but underpinning the various virtuoso treatments of the material is an inch-perfect gauge of the weight of how a story unfolds in its telling.' -- Alex Lockwood * Animal Studies Journal * Humans cannot imagine avian perspectives, Joshua Lobb admits, but his stories explore what we might learn from the attempt. Some of Lobb's strategies are familiar from much recent fiction with ecological themes, such as the use of an educated, intellectually curious narrator-protagonist whose wide reading provides a convenient means of introducing diverse facts and anecdotes about birds into lyrical, richly figurative prose. Others are more adventurous, including shifts in grammatical person and tense. Far from being gratuitous, they foreground substantive questions of intergenerational responsibility. -- Sascha Morrell * Australian Book Review * Lobb's substantial achievement has been to create a cohesive whole in which the parts flow and the patterns resonate. Interlocking and open-ended, the stories are rich with fragments from poems and other texts ... The Flight of Birds creates space for the consciousness of both humans and birds. -- Rowena Lennox * Swamphen * 'It's a deeply thoughtful (and yet often light-hearted and amusing) book about the ethical compromises humans make to justify their relationship with animals. Lobb's novel comes from a different place because it is also a meditation on loss and loneliness, but it shares the same preoccupation with the way we share the same spaces as animals but see ourselves as apart.' -- Lisa Hill * ANZ LitLovers LitBlog * 'The Flight of Birds is full of surprises, as if Lobb is saying to the reader, don't get stuck in the routine of traditional storytelling, come fly with me somewhere dangerous, somewhere fun. I dare you.' -- Catherine McKinnon * Meanjin *