Cherise Saywell’s second novel is a slow-moving drama with a secret at its core. The grey, melancholy cover image of the sea and a cut-out of a bird in flight are an accurate reflection of the contents. Although Saywell’s acclaimed first novel, Desert Fish (2011), was set in a drought-stricken rural town in Australia and is, geographically at least, a million miles away from Twitcher’s English seaside location, both books have marked similarities. Gilly, the protagonist in Desert Fish, also comes from a dysfunctional family and is sadly delusional in the way she latches onto an older man in her desire to improve her sorry circumstances. Kenno is, paradoxically, as naïve and immature as Gilly, and he becomes obsessed not with a lover, but with a house. Both objects of infatuation are seen as golden talismans of hope and renewal. Kenno’s ideal house, Stonehill, is located near a headland and faces out to sea, offering a clear and unimpeded sightline to the bird islands. It is big and airy enough for the whole family to live in comfortably. Kenno believes with the fervency of youth that if he can obtain the necessary funds to buy this parcel of land, his family’s wounds will begin to knit and heal. As members of the working poor who subsist on low-skilled manual labour, they are not in the position to take advantage of the property boom in this popular holiday spot. A miracle is needed in order to claim Stonehill as their own. While his wishful thinking is evident to everyone around him, Kenno’s resilience and stubbornness make him an appealing character, even if his ambition far exceeds his capabilities: ‘We belong to this place – my father, my mother, my sister and me. The cliffs and the sea and the islands and the birds: they fit together in the same way that we do ...’

Saywell’s language is stripped back and unadorned. Writing solely in the first person as a teenage boy, she captures the laconic and at times awkward speech and single-minded vision of her main character. Its young-adult sensibilities translate well into crossover potential. It may appeal to an adolescent audience by virtue of its being narrated by a cautiously optimistic protagonist, still untutored in the cruel ways of the world. The book opens with an arresting description of how seabirds weep as a survival mechanism. When there is no fresh water, they drink from the ocean and salt drips from a gland near their eyes. Later, this image is repeated when Kenno wishes his sick father could weep away the poisonous effects of alcohol and only keep what he needs to maintain his equilibrium. Kenno may be two years younger than his sister, but he is the one who seems burdened with the responsibility of glueing his broken family together, even if they resist his efforts. Playing with traditional gender stereotypes, Saywell makes Lou the risk-taker, the nonchalant smoker, the steely-eyed realist, whereas Kenno is rendered dreamy, self-conscious, empathetic. His vulnerabilities are evoked by the fragile objects to which he is attached – a ship in a glass bottle and a mottled tern’s egg.

Little by little, the truth about the accident is leaked out in acidic drops. The reader learns why Kenno feels he owes a special debt to his father, what he means by ‘ghost pain’, and why his sister is embittered and resentful. Post-traumatic stress disorder in its various guises is treated sympathetically by the author as each character strives to carve out as great a distance as possible between the past and the present. With tact and understatement, Saywell shows how the characters cope in their individual ways. Kenno’s father self-medicates with booze; his mother finds solace through books like How God Will Fix You If You Let Him, and his sister has a ne’er-do-well boyfriend to turn to as an escape from the claustrophobic unhappiness at home.

For those not familiar with the term, Saywell’s title refers to bird-watchers who try to spot as many rare varieties as possible, often travelling great distances to see a new species. Saywell has planted random twitchers in the novel who converge on nearby swamps to check out the avian fauna, as well as a character given to stealing birds’ eggs, but it is probably Kenno’s father himself who is the main twitcher, even if he no longer has the stamina to practise it. There are several symbolic leitmotifs in the novel; one is a rarely-seen albatross that flits in and out of the narrative, and whose random appearances gives hope to Kenno. He certainly thinks that this wider-winged creature who glides higher than the other gulls has to be his albatross. Whether or not it actually is a moot point, but Kenno’s belief sustains and buoys him, particularly as he first sees it when he’s trespassing in Stonehill and comes to regard is as a type of lucky charm. It is clear that he identifies with the bird (nicknamed ‘the vagrant’) and its determination to find a place to nest in an inhospitable environment. He admires that it ‘just keeps going like that: to set about doing the obvious thing as if there were no obstacles preventing it’. Even if, like the albatross, he doesn’t find his preferred place to settle down, Kenno ultimatelylearns the importance of adapting to whatever environment he finds himself in.