Martina Nicholson

I loved reading this book; but now she also has read it so exquisitely, in an audiobook version, a delight which is so beautiful, subtle and strong, meaningful and intelligent! Her grief lived, tracing the death of her father, her childhood, the effect of books she had loved as a child, including T.H. White's history of King Arthur as Wot, being taught by Merlin, and the history of falconry, the details from the past several centuries. The book is a gift of depth and resonance from a time when people read, when knowledge was something we worked to grasp, centering us in nature, like trying to train the goshawk. This is a fabulous book!

This is an amazing novel, well-loved; hallucinatory about science fiction and space travel, and brutally realistic about WWII and the obliterative bombing of Dresden, a beautiful city which was not a military target, but a social one-- to make the Germans willing to surrender. The breadth of his imagination and interest constantly pushes the edges of our consciousness and humane awareness of suffering and absurdity.