Birds Are Liars - by Bernadette McBride (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Birds Are Liars is a sharp, lyrical collection of short stories that confronts the fragility and ferocity of a world in crisis. At once timely and timeless, these stories invite the reader to face the end times with intimacy, rather than look away.

Review Quotes

Birds Are Liars is like a book of murmurations. Startling sentences soar and skitter across its pages in intricate patterns in the most mesmerising way. These stories of desire and loss, memory and uncertainty are often unsettling, always beautiful and surprising. Bernadette McBride has listened to the birds.

-Jeff Young, winner of the 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize, author of Ghost Town and Wild Twin (Little Toller Books)

Bernadette McBride's stories are a tonic for troubled times. Beautifully written, this debut collection shows us that if we could only understand the natural world-and ourselves-more fully, it might just save us from catastrophe. Superb.

-Ian Critchley, winner of the Hammond House International Literary Prize and the HISSAC Short Story Prize, author of Removals (Nightjar Press)

Bernadette McBride is not afraid to take risks, as this original and affective collection of short eco-fiction demonstrates. Lyrical-poetic even-and often formally surprising, McBride's fiction has the uncanny ability to not only connect with and move the reader, but to get right under their skin.

-Paula McGrath, author of Generation and A History of Running Away (John Murray Press)

Evoking the texture of subjective experience in the age of extinction, microplastics, and data centres-a world replete with energy and catastrophe, information and death-is no mean feat. McBride achieves it brilliantly in these evocative, formally daring short stories. Shot through with melancholy and wonder, Birds Are Liars reads like a visionary dispatch from a future so close we might as well be living it, with uncanny echoes of present events: "Warnings spread across Europe." But if McBride is clear-eyed about the damage wrought in the name of human progress-which may be coming back to haunt us-she is equally attuned to the indestructible capacity for tenderness and hope: "a bright light pierced the darkness like a fire in the air."

-Patrick Langley, author of Arkady and The Variations (Fitzcarraldo)

Bernadette McBride's stories brim with life. Both urgent and tender, full of a wisdom which makes a space for metamorphosis in the face of complexity and pain, these remarkable stories speak to the burning world. McBride has found for herself a language that is poetic, resonant, and full of care.

-Deryn Rees-Jones, poet, Hôtel Amour and T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato (Seren Books)

In Birds Are Liars, McBride's expansive imagination is rigorously underpinned by climate science and real events to explore complex ethical and affective entanglements at this time of global ecological crisis. These stories, told from an impressive range of perspectives (from water flea, to human, to the wind!), provide an intellectual and creative gateway for readers to contemplate their own emotions, beliefs and ethics relating to care, responsibility and interconnectedness in the era of planetary decline.

-Ruby Robinson, poet, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize, with Every Little Sound (Pavilion Poetry)

McBride's pen moves hither and thither across the pages of this work with such graceful elegance that the reader becomes both hypnotised and immersed.

-Ged Thompson, author, poet, and storyteller