Porter's second novel, Lanny (2019), offered an unusual take on an outsider child, a whimsical woodsprite with an affinity for nature who goes missing.

Grief, which hit the right balance between the heartbreak of a mother's death and Porter's inventive, poetic, sardonic, typographically playful text, was a hard act to follow.

This wise-cracking feathered friend takes up residence - metaphorical residence, at any rate - to help the grieving family navigate their loss. They find consolation in a big black crow that seems to have stepped out of the Ted Hughes poems the father is writing about for a scholarly book. In Porter's superb first novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers (2016), a father and his two young sons are unmoored by the sudden death of their mother. (Though a couple of dead badgers play an unusual role in this latest dark scenario.) It's also his first not to rely on an odd supernatural being to help save the day. Shy is the third and shortest of his trio of largely unplotted, unconventional, neo-modernist novels involving unhappy lads and their stressed parents. Max Porter has become something of a patron saint of troubled boys - and of parents under pressure.

7 feathers