The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

It is not a story that falls easily into sequence.
For the sea has claimed its own and spreads its rippled blanket over the site, and the great white bird with the black-tipped pinions that saw it all from the beginning to the end has returned to the dark, frozen silences of the northlands whence it came.
The Snow Goose is a beautifully written, poignant tale set against the background of the Dunkirk invasion. Frith’s unspoken love for Rhayader, a lonely artist, the snow goose’s constant presence and the haunting landscape of the Essex coast all fuse together to make this story as memorable now as in 1941,when it surfaced.
Gallico’s spare, poetic writing evokes a desolate sadness of both time and space: the sense of place of a war-torn past.
Greys and blues and soft greens are the colours, for when the skies are dark in the long winters, the many waters of the beaches and marshes reflect the cold and sombre colour.

The Snow Goose gives me everything I need: a poignant story, a sense of place, beautiful descriptions and authentic characters drawn from the landscape. Less is more: forty pages to be read again and savoured with as much joy as when I first came across it in 1972.