Delia Falconer

We have been aware for centuries that we are responsible for the earth’s denudation: its ‘cold staring spaces’, as English…

Every time I see a bird or bee these days,’ a friend says when we are talking on the phone, ‘I find myself wondering if it’s the last.

It is a tragedy for the planet’s wild creatures if they disappear: it is also a tragedy for us. If we lose all but our most domesticated companions, do we risk becoming something less than the humans we once were? Can we bear to live with just ourselves?’

Only the Animals consists of ten stories arranged chronologically from 1892 to 2006, each of which is recounted by an animal that has died as a casualty of human conflict. Its engaging animal narrators include a young elephant from Mozambique, a bear that has starved to death in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo, and even a horny, existentially questing mussel killed at Pearl Harbour.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena hinges on the story of a Chechen villager who, over five days, tries to save a young girl from a Russian death squad. But its ambitions don’t stop at exhaustive research and breaking new fictional ground…

The critical response to Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – both of which deal with the Iraq war – has been notable for its constant and desperate refrain that a ‘great novel’ should emerge from this conflict.

At their core, both Sydney and Signs and Wonders are books that think with what she calls ‘complicated feelings’. This is not simply to say that Falconer writes essays about feeling that are themselves keenly felt. More than this, the essayist determined to see ‘how this world goes’ must see it feelingly, as if mapping the dark room of insight with her hands.