A husband loses his wife, two boys lose their mother – and they get crow in return. No, really. Crow. With a capital C. Crow moves in with them, the feathered, cawing, butcher-beaked bird of scavenge, the haunter of battlefields and rubbish tips and, in this brief but memorable prose poem, Crow puts them back together again. As the boys say, in the most moving of many moving lines in the book:

We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we wave at crows.

It’s not that weird.