Birdsong

One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are undistinguished – from the hinterlands of society, whether by virtue of status, wealth or age; yet they reveal some irrepressible glint of antinomianism, a rejection of conventional judgments and standards, a certain anarchic glee. In the title story, elderly Mrs Calder insists she is being accompanied by a hyena – ‘always a little on the

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence. Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.) Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an