'Young women like yourself ought to be with someone. The sheep is one of Jake's flock, the second she's found dead in the last month, though about what or who is terrorising her animals, she's unsure: is it a fox, bored local teenagers in search of creepy kicks, or something altogether more sinister? As a single female foreigner living and working with these animals all by herself, Jake hasn't exactly endeared herself to the locals on the island. Everything you need to know about Wyld's writing is here in this first line - its visceral, fierce and starkly elegant. The novel opens like a punch to the gut with the image of a freshly slain sheep, 'mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding'. Here, in her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, Wyld hunkers down in the same familiar emotional terrain, though this time her protagonist is female - not that you'd guess it from her name, Jake Whyte - and the setting switches between the dry, dusty Australia of Jake's youth and the windy, wet wilds of the small unnamed British island where she's now living. Set against the backdrop of the unforgiving Australian bush, After the Fire was a novel about men who couldn't talk to each other their stunted relationships, internalised trauma and deep loneliness. It won her prizes and critical acclaim, and marked her out as a writer to watch. Wyld hit the ground running with her first novel, Both prove equally unnerving in this tour de force of literary skill, writes Lucy Scholesĭespite the recent controversy surrounding what appears to be the disintegration of Granta, you can't fault them in one thing: the inclusion of Evie Wyld on the latest of their decade-defining Best of Young British Novelists lists.

In her second novel, Evie Wyld explores loneliness and stunted relationships in a narrative that flashes between two unwelcoming landscapes: hot, arid Australia and a small, wet British island.

All the birds singing