Birding by Rose Ruane is longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025.
The novel is about two women living in a rundown, gentrifying seaside town in Britain, arriving at their moment of realisation of how their lives have been affected by damaging events of the past and their beginning to separate from and reject the power this has had over them.
One Woman’s Trauma is Another (Wo)Man’s Drama
Lydia, in her late forties is contacted by Henry “the most assiduously avoidant human she’d ever encountered”, to inform her he will put on a play that recounts a part of their history that ought to have negated their continued contact. Lydia is stunned, haunted and full of regret.
Joyce, of similar age, lives with her super controlling, critical mother Betty in a small house a few blocks back from the sea, after their comedown from The Palace, the departure of Joyce’s father without a word of explanation or contact since she was a child.
Beyond the beach, streets lined with terraces and bungalows crouch behind Victorian buildings with mid-century interiors; carved up into bedsits and B&Bs, their pastel facades crumble like stale cake after a party.
The impact of absent men on both women works like an invisible thread, until a mass social movement of women sharing their experiences of abuse awakens the impact and creates an increasingly conscious ripple effect in their lives.
Like Mother Like Daughter, But No
Joyce has never joined adulthood, her mother keeping her in a kind of stasis, until one Saturday evening when they prepare to go to the club, Betty utters that maybe they might meet a man, both of them, mother and daughter.
Joyce knows people stare because she and her mother wear identical outfits and hairstyles, attired as if they are twins.
Birding navigates a short period of time in these two women’s lives as they live with who they have become and reflect on significant aspects of the past in the 90’s that shaped them.
A lifetime’s habit of exactitude Joyce never used to question. But it has begun to feel stuffy and constricting, as if Joyce is outgrowing all her clothes.
Fake Spice Not Nice
Lydia and her friend Pandora had been a one hit pop wonder in their youth, a promising career thwarted by bad decisions made by powerful people that had little impact on the decision maker’s, but curtailed the girls’ dreams and made them targets of scorn for a while.
Lydia has always been carried by Pan’s sheer force of will; even when unsure if she’s been bullied or beloved, Lydia’s always ridden pillion on Pan’s survival instinct.
But whereas Pan has perfected the art of utter denial, Lydia has not. It never works.
Both have a desire to step outside of their patterns and in some small way the shift begins to happen, as their current minor transgressions exhibit a healthier rebellion and acknowledgement of what inside them, needs to find expression.
It’s a novel that carries a message of hope amid the lost opportunities that stunt some lives, showing the effect one has upon the other. In an interview about her multi-disciplinary creative life, Rose Ruane shared lines from a poem by Frank Bidart that reflect a truth she has learned to live by, one perhaps shared by her characters as they come into their own.
Whether you love what you love
Or live in divided ceaseless
Revolt against it
What you love is your fate
Further Reading
Women’s Prize: In Conversation With Rose Ruane
Irish Times : Birding by Rose Ruane: Friendship, friction and moments of reckoning
Article: Rose Ruane – A Creative Life Story by Leslie Tate
Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings. Women’s Prize
Author, Rose Ruane
Rose Ruane is an artist and writer living and working in Glasgow. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and completed a Master of Fine Art research degree and an MLitt in creative writing at the University of Glasgow. She has made podcasts and documentaries for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland and Radiophrenia, exhibited her art at home and abroad, and was the 2015 winner of the Off West End Adopt A Playwright award.
Rose is chair of The Adamson Collection, comprised of work created in the art therapy studio at Netherne Hospital during the mid-20th century and is about to complete a PhD exploring the lives and experiences of the individuals who were compelled to live there. Rose is an avid collector of 20th Century crafts and kitsch. Birding is her second novel.
Set in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’, in the mid 1970’s, Trespasses began with what seemed like a chance encounter, when a known barrister, Michael Agnew, a married man of the opposite faith, a Protestant, known to provide legal defence to IRA members; a man who had known Cushla’s father, sat at the bar, while she was serving, engaging her in stilted conversation.
Word by Word 