About SPECK

The novel is a work of speculative fiction set in rural England just after the first world war. 

Speck is a young crow, the storyteller of the Southwood flock and grandson of the leader, coming-of-age in a time of hardship and political instability. After he is censured and shunned for his re-interpretation of the Sacred Story, he longs to regain his status and mate with his love, Slender. But as the flock buckles under the weight of the Sickness and the threat of human violence, the abuses of power within the flock’s leadership become harder to ignore. When his younger sister defies the male-dominated conventions of the flock he is forced to set himself against his family, and with the growing threat of extermination from the farmer whose land borders the flock roosting tree, he faces a final confrontation that promises revenge or redemption.

SPECK combines the allegory of Orwell’s Animal Farm with the fable-like adventure of Adam’s Watership Down.