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Field Notes from an Extinction
  • Published: 31 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781644215340
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $45.00

Field Notes from an Extinction

A Novel

  • Eoghan Walls
Formats & editions
EBook
3 Mar 2026
Paperback
31 Mar 2026
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Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island—from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island—from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment--dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.
  • Published: 31 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781644215340
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $45.00
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Praise for Field Notes from an Extinction

Praise for The Gospel of Orla:

“As coming-of-age stories go, The Gospel of Orla is winningly off-kilter. Walls refuses easy sentimentality, and the story is brisk and surprising, perfectly paced. . . . Walls’s marvelous novel asks what we might look for by way of consolation. A miracle shouldn’t be too much to ask.”—Claire Luchette, The New York Times Book Review

“By turns funny, surprising, moving. With a poet’s control and playfulness, it paints a convincing portrait of a teenagers grief and resilience."—Niamh Donnelly, The Irish Times

"[Orla] is a brilliantly engaging protagonist. By blending a fable-like structure and Orla’s grittily realistic voice, Walls has created a consistently surprising, evocative, almost impossible to put down, and gloriously original work." —Booklist

"In The Gospel of Orla by Northern Irish poet Eoghan Walls, Ireland represents the land of the heart’s desire for its 14-year-old heroine, living in Lancashire with her father and little sister. Distraught at the recent death of her mother, Orla plans to run away to Liverpool to board the ferry and surprise her maternal relatives. There is just one hitch; escaping on her bike in the middle of the night, she collides with a homeless man who claims, very persuasively, to be the resurrected Jesus.  . . . [A] weird and original tale." —Financial Times

Praise for The Gospel of Orla:

“As coming-of-age stories go, The Gospel of Orla is winningly off-kilter. Walls refuses easy sentimentality, and the story is brisk and surprising, perfectly paced. . . . Walls’s marvelous novel asks what we might look for by way of consolation. A miracle shouldn’t be too much to ask.”—Claire Luchette, The New York Times Book Review

“By turns funny, surprising, moving. With a poet’s control and playfulness, it paints a convincing portrait of a teenagers grief and resilience."—Niamh Donnelly, The Irish Times

"[Orla] is a brilliantly engaging protagonist. By blending a fable-like structure and Orla’s grittily realistic voice, Walls has created a consistently surprising, evocative, almost impossible to put down, and gloriously original work." —Booklist

"In The Gospel of Orla by Northern Irish poet Eoghan Walls, Ireland represents the land of the heart’s desire for its 14-year-old heroine, living in Lancashire with her father and little sister. Distraught at the recent death of her mother, Orla plans to run away to Liverpool to board the ferry and surprise her maternal relatives. There is just one hitch; escaping on her bike in the middle of the night, she collides with a homeless man who claims, very persuasively, to be the resurrected Jesus.  . . . [A] weird and original tale." —Financial Times