Starling Days

Set in New York and London and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and a selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days is a stunningly observed and unflinching yet tender novel that interrogates the relationship between mental illness and love.

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump, but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar, is called to pick her up.

Oscar hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will give Mina the space to heal, so they move to London, to Oscar’s oldest friends and an apartment wallpapered with indigo-eyed birds, near a canal and flower market. Mina, a classicist, works on her book about mythological women and searches for solutions to her failing mental health by pondering their lives. Penelope, Psyche, Leda . . . They all survived, didn’t they? Even Iphigenia, in one of the tellings. Mina finally finds a beam of light in Phoebe, a real-life woman, and Oscar and Mina’s complicated love is tested.

A gorgeously wrought novel, variously about love, mythology, mental illness, and the times we need to seek out milder psychological climates, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days is a complex and compelling work of fiction by a singularly gifted writer.