The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature - she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations.
But, even if she escapes, she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters, it is the humans - all of them now simply scrambling to survive - who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.
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The Strange Bird's first thought was of a sky over an ocean she had never seen, in a place far from the fire-washed laboratory from which she emerged, cage smashed open but her wings, miraculous, unbroken.- THE ESCAPE
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(4th Estate, 30 November 2017, e-book, 84 pages, bought from AmazonKindle)
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I really enjoyed The Strange Bird. This novella is a spin off from the novel Borne as the great bear features a few times. This is a strange and at times quite sad read. The bird only wants to survive and be free to do what she feels is in her nature. She's denied this time and again by a broken world, by creatures as strange as her but sinister as well and by human's who can't escape their nature. I didn't want this novella to end.
