Margaret Renkl and Mary Laura Philpott: The Comfort of Crows - A Backyard Year

In The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, award-winning bestselling author Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons-from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring-what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.
Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author-and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.”
With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.
Renkl lives in Nashville and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. She will be in conversation with Mary Laura Philpott, the nationally bestselling author of I Miss You When I Blink and the memoir Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, which won the Southern Book Prize and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of NPR’s “Favorite Books of 2022.”