Field Notes from an Extinction

This novel takes the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations kept by Ignatius Green, a fictional English scientist. The Royal Society has sent him to Tor Mor, a remote island off the northern coast of Ireland. A widower, Green is single-minded and self-righteous, both brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to correct the scientific record on the Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), gathering every detail he can about its mating rituals, its feeding, and the care of its hatchlings.

His ordered existence falls apart when his monthly delivery of supplies arrives ransacked by the local Irish townsmen. His anger at their impertinence is matched by his dismay at finding a small child in the shipment, dirty, abandoned, mute, feral and impossible to manage. Meanwhile the locals are growing restless and hungry, and talk is spreading across the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green must fight to survive against brigands, hunger and, most daunting of all, the fierce and angry will of the child. Amid the wider social unrest, he may also come to a broader understanding of what family means.