Snow Birds by Roisin Maguire: A pleasant, hopeful read

Snow Birds

Author: Roisin Maguire

ISBN-13: 9781806490813

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Guideline Price: £ 14.99; 217pp

In Roisin Maguire’s sequel to Night Swimmers, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Kate O’Brien Award, we return to the village of Ballybrady, where “any more than two people together constituted a crowd” and the irascible protagonist Grace Kielty, who doesn’t like cars or cities, nor people much either.

Grace has been plagued by newcomers and “idiotic townies” in recent years, forcing her to share “her own secret beach” with sea swimmers who are “all smiles and scent and screaming”. The main intruders are a swimming group who call themselves the Duckie Divers.

When the Department for the Environment receives a proposal that the neighbouring Gull Island be opened for “harvesting of periwinkles, without any moratorium for the nesting of the endangered roseate tern”, Grace finds herself working with the Duckie Divers to help protect the rare birds and their habitat. Through her conservation efforts Grace realises the importance of community and finds “a new vulnerability and a new connection all at once”.

For Grace, saving the rosies that “meant summer to her, and balance, and rarity and all things good in the world” doesn’t just help her winged neighbours, it also offers a sense of purpose and an opportunity to build relationships.

In working together with the Duckie Divers, she acknowledges “it was so strange how little people knew of one another, of their real selves, their real lives”. She comes to learn that the roseate terns, like those fighting for their protection, are “little warriors, despite it all”.

Maguire’s setting is visually compelling with visceral descriptions of coastal village life; “the rasp of salt water on bare shoulders and back” and “heavy cloud [that] pressed the water deliciously flat and still”. And there is a comedic cast of characters, all with their own reasons for taking to the sea. As journalist Frances puts it, this is a story of “some endangered wild birds, some crazy old birds trying to save them”.

Snow Birds is a hopeful, pleasant read centred on friendship and resilience, with a little romance sprinkled in. The novel is a quiet call for respect for nature and all our neighbours, human and otherwise.

Catherine Higgins-Moore is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast’s Seamus Heaney Centre.