Titterstone Clee, Everyday Life, Industrial History and Dialect, Alf Jenkins

Wildlife in the Marches, Mark Lawley

The Concise Gray’s Anatomy, C.H. Leonard

Bringewood Chase and Surrounding Countryside, David Lovelace

The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane

Beside the Ocean of Time, George Mackay Brown

Greenvoe, George Mackay Brown

Hawkfall, George Mackay Brown

Pictures in the Cave, George Mackay Brown

The Victorian Domestic Servant, Trevor May

The Victorian Schoolroom, Trevor May

London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew

London’s Underworld, Henry Mayhew

Mayhew’s London, Henry Mayhew

Victorian Lady Travellers, Dorothy Middleton

The Victorian Hospital, Lavinia Mitton

The Mitchell Beazley Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers, Peter D Moore

The Knife Man, Wendy Moore

Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, edited by Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher

Victorian London, Liza Picard

Walking on the Orkney and Shetland Isles, Graham Uney

The Life and Times of Mortimer Forest in a Nutshell, Julia Walling (Butterfly Conservation)

If Walls Could Talk, Lucy Worsley

St George’s Bloomsbury, London, World Monuments Fund publication

Back to Backs, National Trust publication

The British Newspaper Archive

Hammond Turner Button Museum

If you wish to follow in any of the characters footsteps, here are some places you might like to visit.

London

The Old Operating Theatre

Charles Dickens’s House/Museum

The Post Office Museum

St George’s, Bloomsbury

Dennis Severs’s House

Ludlow and the Midlands

The Blood Bay, Ludlow

The Blue Boar, Ludlow

The Angel Inn, Ludlow

Ludlow Museum Resource Centre

The Judge’s Lodging, Presteigne

Elton Hall, Elton (not open to the public)

St Leonard’s Church, Ludlow

The Back to Backs, Birmingham

Orkney

The Kirbuster Farm Museum

Stromness Museum

The Orkney Museum, Kirkwall

Westray Heritage Centre

Sanday Heritage Centre

Reading Group Questions

Reading Group Questions

1. The Gifts follows multiple characters. Who was your favourite? Who did you feel was the central character?

2. How does this novel explore gender? Do you think Edward would have reacted differently if he had found winged men, not women?

3. What role does religion play in the novel, and how do religion and science both clash and complement each other?

4. Both Etta and Annie sketch and draw. What role do you think art plays in the novel?

5. How does the historical and geographical setting affect the story? How do you think a phenomena like this would be treated in a different time and place?

6. What do you think of Edward, and how did you opinion of him change throughout the novel?

7. What do you think the significance of the title is?

8. What do you think Edward and Annie’s life would have been like if Edward hadn’t discovered the ‘angels’? Does Edward’s obsession change him, or was he always going to be the person he becomes?

9. Natalya tells stories, Mary, Richard and Jos all write, and myths circulate about the ‘angels’. What role does storytelling play in the book?