Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.

Man, I love a good opening sentence. Here we have one that immediately grabs you (Another???), resonates with poetry, and, though you won’t realize it quite yet, sets up the book’s pattern of misdirection. For despite what a reading of that first sentence would lead you to believe, this is not going to unfold like a mystery novel. We are not going to have what killed these sheep ever spelled out for us. This book is about something more interesting, and far more disturbing.

Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that.

Let's not overlook the second sentence, either. The prose poetry continues, and it connects with the book's title: birds are going to be a persistent element in the story, looking down from a distance, observing (and judging?). Crows specifically are symbolic of a number of things: doom (the protagonist's back story, told backwards), trickery (the author's misdirections, including the protagonist's very name: Jake, suggesting a male), supernatural mystery (what might that dark shadow be that she suspects of killing the sheep?).

Jake is living on an unnamed (invented?) island off the coast of England, running a farm of 50 sheep... now down to 48. She has come for the isolation, running away from a past in Australia that will be revealed in pieces in alternating chapters that run back in time. She shies away from contact with her neighbors, believing that she's always being negatively judged.

The chapters of her past tease with gradually parceled out information. How did she get those scars on her back? What sort of relationship did she have with this Otto person? What happened to her relationship with, and within, her family? How did she come to be working as a teenage prostitute?

The chapters of her present, in contrast to the dry heat and sharp edges of her Australian past, are wet, muddy and blurred on her English island. A drunk man stumbles onto her property and she develops perhaps a slightly unlikely relationship with him, allowing him to move in to her downstairs and help a bit with the sheep. His past is a bit shrouded, though nothing like hers. The main focus, however, is on what is killing her sheep.

This is never revealed, we are given only clues, and is the obvious source of conjecture/confusion in reviews here. Here's my guess, and you might want to stop reading now if you're reading reviews before reading the book rather than after..

The large, shadowy presence she blames for the killings is not actually an earthly physical entity, nor is it some supernatural entity acting with agency in the world. It is a metaphor for a dark past, filled with guilt. One reason for believing it's not actually "real", besides the unlikelihood of a large unknown animal living on a small island, is that on a couple of occasions she believes it enters her house: though she doesn't ever actually see it, she hears it. But she hears it doing impossible things, like racing up the stairs - where no stairs actually exist. And when she thinks see sees it in her sheep pen and shoots at it, Lloyd tells her she hit a sheep. At the end of the novel, Lloyd believes he sees it in the woods, but then he’s another person living with dark event over his head. It is suggested, though only conjectured, that another character has seen it as well – this a young man with a troubled upbringing who began acts of arson after his mother died and recently returned from being sent to jail after his father pressed charges. So it seems to make sense that this shadow is just that, a shadow, a metaphor.

What is actually killing her sheep? Just an average, everyday fox, perhaps the one she sees lurking on the edge of her woods, with two small cubs. Lurking nightmares flung up by our imaginations, informed by our past, can be far worse than what we actually find right in front of us, today. ( )

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, is about an isolated sheep farmer (Jake Whyte) who is trying to escape a past so painful she can only revisit it in screaming nightmares. The structure of this novel is ingenious: a chronological present alternating with a past that's gradually revealed in reverse. Starting with the first paragraph -- where Jake discovers someone or something has gutted one of her sheep -- the paranoia Jake feels is palpable, and you can't help but race through this book to find out why. Brilliant. ( )

My feelings are so torn about this book. In the beginning, it was confusing to understand whether Jake was presently living alone on her own sheep farm or if she was currently living on a different sheep farm with a group of male coworkers. Once I sorted that out, the story became excellent. Even though the author confused me again by completing abandoning the story of Jake's time living with male coworkers on a sheep farm. The author then added in different earlier time frames of Jake's life. I was loving the book and engrossed in Jake's story. I love animals and there are a lot of scenes described that made me cringe, which I did not appreciate. In the end, I was utterly disappointed with the book. It left me feeling as though the author randomly stopped writing one day and decided to send the book off her publisher. This is not an ending that leaves you to make-up your own mind about what happened. The ending completely left me hanging and once again, confused. Hence, why I'm so torn. I decided on a two-star rating instead of a one-star rating because there are parts of the story that are amazing and I think it has potential to be something great...if the author ever decides to finish writing it that is. ( )

All the Birds, Singing is set in a remote island off the coast of Britain, and in the scorching heat of the Australian outback. The central character, Jake, is living on the island running a small sheep farm on her own, and her sheep are dying violently from some kind of mysterious attack. A stranger turns up on her farm, giving her grounds for suspicion.

The book also tells the story of Jake’s life as a shearer in remote Western Australian, where she struggles as the only woman in a very male shed. Like all the others there, Jake has secrets that she is keeping from others. As Wyld tells her story, she starts to reveal those secrets, while also recounting Jake’s attempts in Britain to identify the threat to her sheep farm.

Wyld perfectly captures the heat and loneliness of the Outback and the taciturn nature of the people who make their lives there. I think that she is less successful in capturing remote rural England; the people there come across a bit cliched. The Australian arc of the narrative is also much better told than the English arc and the resolutions feel more complete in the former. Still, the book is really well written and is an engaging read.

All the Birds, Singing won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s top literary award, and it’s not hard to see why. I can’t help but think, personally, that I’d rather see the award go to somebody who is not described on her book’s blurb as one of the Best New British Novelists. I don’t think that’s what the Miles Franklin is for. ( )

Inspired to read by NYTBR June 15 2014. From last paragraph: "...if the novel sounds forbiddingly dark, it's not. It's swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won't only root for Jake, you'll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling. There's hope at the end,and wit, and friendship...."