Lest a reader mistake the title of Evie Wyld’s second novel, All the Birds, Singing, for a promise of something cheerful, Wyld cuts right to the chase in the opening paragraph, with the grisly image of a freshly slain sheep. The very word “singing” is similarly and swiftly undercut, death-curious crows cawing and cackling harshly as the narrator shoos them from the carcass.

 

The narrator is Jake, a farmer who has been living in isolation on a wet, blustery British island for the last three years and whose animals are being killed, one at a time, by an unknown predator. Jake has clearly been expecting something terrible to happen: She’s a woman on high alert, with various weapons stashed around a house bought from a neighboring farmer, in which the fireplace remains unused and the pictures are of the previous occupant’s family. Her canine companion is simply called “Dog.” She appears to talk to herself more than to others. All signs indicate a woman keeping life at arms length, wary of people, of getting comfortable, watching the dark outside the house that seems to watch her back.

 

This sense of dread gains context and intensifies as the book alternates between Jake’s present life and her former life in Australia, which is explored in chapters that move backward in time, peeling back the layers of what led to her flight to the other side of the world. The book reads like a thriller in both directions: We watch present Jake trying to identify the thing that has come to hunt her sheep—and her; and we descend into the past traumas that she has tried so hard to outrun, right down to the awful incident that derailed the course of her life those many years ago.

 

It’s a brutal story, with language to match. Like the searing heat of western Australia, Wyld’s prose throbs with violent images and shimmers with a suspense that rarely subsides. But there’s a simple beauty to the rhythm of her writing and an attention to the senses, particularly to sound, that makes the story not only vivid but intimate. There’s also humor, wry and shrewd, which keeps the bleakness at bay.

 

Most crucially, Jake is a likeable and interesting hero. She may be hunted and haunted and struggling to reconcile the safety she feels in isolation with her growing need for human connection, but she is not fragile. She takes pride in her physical strength, reminds herself that she is capable, faces her fears with both steel and vulnerability. She is also caring, often moved either to nurture or to use her strength to violently end an animal’s suffering.

 

So when we see those first tentative threads of trust and connection begin to take hold, it feels earned, and we root for her. And we come to understand that this is as much a story of an outsider’s rediscovery of the bonds that bind people as it is about monsters. Wyld reminds us that we may not be able to outrun the monsters within and without us, whether real or imagined, human or inhuman, but we can gain new strength to face them. There’s little sentiment in All the Birds, Singing, but there’s warmth that ripples through its toughness, and there is hope.