I want to find out how they behave when they're free. Len Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life and loves behind, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds. Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote two bestselling books, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed. This moving novel imagines the story of this remarkable woman's decision to defy society's expectations, and the joy she drew from her extraordinary relationship with the natural world.