Last Bird Singing  is an extraordinary and stunning evocation of one man’s inner life, dark, haunting and bitterly true. The walls, pubs and streets of Wales’ capital city loom through the blackness of an intense,  brilliantly realised story of loneliness and loss.

 

Tommy Oliver is a man with no hope. He is tortured by the mistakes of the past, a past in which he was passionate about his work, his wife, his football and his dreamworld of the silver screen.

Filled with longings but unable to face his empty life, Tommy sets fire to his Splott home, leaves, then returns to trace the map of his frustrated world through the dark streets of Cardiff. But family life stalks him and as his estranged son becomes enmeshed in the underside of Cardiff life, death and vengeance call for one final act. 

  

Praise for Last Bird Singing:

"To be sucked into the slipstream of this ice-cold odyssey through Cardiff past and present is to confront a brute reality which Allan Bush creates in prose as clear and iridescent as oil-slicked puddles on a city street. No one, but no one, has ever written about Cardiff’s deep reality like Bush does: attempts at Noir pale into insignificance before its deep and disturbing blackness of vision."  – Dai Smith