Cheney print in new novel by our very own Dr Robinson

New novel The Birder by Dr Lorna Robinson is set in a mysterious Oxford city where people transform instead of dying, and where an ancient poem by Ovid might hold the key to the mystery at the heart of this strange yet familiar universe.

Since witnessing her brother change into a blackbird at an early age, Merel has never felt quite at home in the world.

She embarks on a journey through science, religion, art and philosophy in her effort to come to terms with her loss. When she discovers a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her local library, she soon becomes convinced that her world was not meant to be this way, and that this book holds the secret for putting things back on track.

Illustrated with linocut prints of birds around the city of Oxford, The Birder creates a mysterious world that is filled with familiar sorrows and joys.

Dr Lorna Robinson is the founding director of the Iris Project, a charity which runs a range of classical initiatives in state schools and communities. She is also the founding director of the Rumble Museum at Cheney School, the first fully accredited museum as part of a school.

She has previously published a series of storybook courses Telling Tales in Latin: Parts 1 and 2, and Telling Tales in Greek. She has also published Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ovid: Magical and Monstrous Realities.

More recently, she embarked on a fiction project with illustrator Lydia Hall, which involved re-imagining Greek myths connected to plants. Together they published four small books in the series, Telling Tales in Nature: Underworld Tales, Forest Tales, Orchard Tales and Meadow Tales. These are now published as a compendium.

Lydia Hall is an illustrator and printmaker based in Glasgow. She has worked, both on personal projects and with schools and organisations, to create bold narrative based work. With an emphasis on collaboration, she seeks to use her practice to tell thoughtful and intriguing stories.

The book is available as a hardback here.