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Out Of A Clear Sky
- Author: Sally Hinchcliffe
- Category: Fiction Crime / Thriller Commercial
- Publisher: Picador
- Pub date: February 2008
- Length: 300
About Out Of A Clear Sky
Imagine if you spent your whole time watching, only to discover that you yourself were being watched…
Manda Brooks, the narrator in this psychological thriller, is obsessed with birds – identifying them, cataloguing them, recording their details and habits. After breaking up with her long-term partner and co-watcher, she finds herself ostracized suddenly from their close group of friends. So she resolves to build her own ‘year list’ – a chronicle of annual bird sightings – as a way of forging life anew, but at the same time begins to fall prey to the ever more sinister attentions of another bird-watcher, whom she keeps bumping into on the scene. Soon he is turning up everywhere, and Manda flees. But what’s really driving her on is perhaps more complicated than she would allow.
Richly observed, OUT OF A CLEAR SKY sits at the top end of the psychological thriller market. It is a novel about obsession and truth: the detail is beautifully rendered; and, in Manda, Sally has created a fascinating, dark and compelling voice.
About the Author
Born in London in 1969, Sally grew up all over the world as her father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan. In 2004 she did an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck and as part of the course helped found and edit the Mechanics’ Institute Review, aka MIR. Besides OUT OF A CLEAR SKY, she has published a number of short stories, including ‘In Heaven there is no Beer’, a 2005 Asham Award runner up. She worked for over 10 years at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew before giving up her job and moving to Scotland to write full time. She has long been a keen birdwatcher and has sought birds wherever she has travelled – from Antarctica to Swaziland and all points in between.