You will know the face before the byline. Russell Tovey, born in Essex in 1981, has been a fixture of British screen drama for two decades: George the werewolf in Being Human, Rudge in both the stage and film versions of The History Boys, Steve in Him and Her, Kevin in HBO’s Looking, and more recently Patrick Read in American Horror Story: NYC.
Away from acting he has become one of the more interesting voices in British visual culture: an obsessive collector, and co-host of Talk Art, the long running podcast that has done a great deal to make contemporary art feel approachable. That habit of looking closely and asking people to explain themselves feeds directly into his fiction.
Starlings is his first novel, and it is not a celebrity side project. It is a book about family estrangement, queer identity and the cost of being made unwelcome at home, written by someone who has clearly been thinking about all three for a long time.
8 hours and 4 minutes
