Flamingo: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022, an exquisite novel of kindness and hope

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In the 1980’s Daniel (then five-years-old) and his mother lived next door to Sherry and her family, and the two families soon formed a very close bond.

It changes style a few times and the chapters become shorter, making the book pick up pace as you read it. It tells the story of determination, desire, heartbreak, loss and redemption and does so in a way which will have you giggling one moment then sobbing the next.Bevis’s wit and inventiveness shine through, even when dealing with painful subjects… Bevis often employs the surreal to give us refreshing and new perspectives on serious societal problems… Flamingo concludes with a sequence of poems that demonstrate Bevis’s bravery, both in the content matter (a cancer diagnosis) and in the imaginative use of metaphor and imagery. Heartbreaking, tender and funny, Flamingo is a novel about all kinds of love, from the brilliant to the catastrophic. Set in 2018 and the 80s, it’s a song for the broken-hearted and the big-hearted, and is, ultimately, a novel grown from gratitude, and a book full of wild hope. But the unspoken element is Eve (now a professor in Edinburgh and New York, where she has moved with her wife) – a breach between her and Daniel which has moved to something of a chasm after a recent revelation – is painful, particularly for Sherry and Rea – and as Rea and Daniel begin a tentative, still platonic but deeply felt relationship, the family look to help understand and resolve this breach.

this new title from the brilliant Animal series does for the Flamingo what it has done for other birds. The book takes place over two main periods: 1984 (in Norfolk) and 2018 (across Norfolk, Somerset and even the park in New York that I visit when I am there. You’re not sure how they connect until several chapters in, and as we meet the families that become neighbors (Eve and her son Daniel; Leslie, Sherry, Rae and Pauline) and the best of friends in the 80s, we realize some sort of falling out occurred now that 30 years later they’re no longer in contact. Teilweise ist es wirr, für mitten im Leben stehende Menschen auf den ersten Blick nicht nachvollziehbar, was hier geschieht.

Flamingo, at its dysfunctional heart, is a story of people learning to let go and grow, to accept and love people regardless of their flaws, to find a radical space in the heart for kindness to flow. Also included are suggestions for activities and ideas to talk through together to help children understand their emotions. Maybe the ending is intended as a happy one, but I was left wondering if history was about to repeat itself. Each design is beautifully hand painted with watercolours and digitally finished by Lisa before being Giclée printed by our local professional print partner.

series by Anna James, Counting to Bananasand B is for Bananas (written by Carrie Tillotson and illustrated by Estrela Lourenço), A Family Looks Like Love (written by Kaitlyn Wells; illustrated by Sawyer Cloud) and How to Get Your Octopus to School (written by Becky Scharnhorst; illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett). Eventually though a breach between Sherry and Eve causes Eve to resume her family’s wanderings leaving a never fully healed breach in all their lives. I didn’t notice the ‘saids’ when reading it but did notice the use of symbols and the language more. I’m not sure that I’d agree with other reviewers that this book is entirely about kindness; certainly, there are plenty of positives to this tale, but there was, I felt, always something rather sinister about Sherry and Leslie.The writing style makes this easy-to-read although the themes in this novel aren’t always as comfortable to deal with. The structure of this book is really interesting… the first two sections are very long (75 and 120 pages respectively) and then there are 12 more sections with only 10-30ish pages, so I felt the second half really flew.