# The Company of Swans

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/jim-crumley/the-company-of-swans/9781787300620

![The Company of Swans](https://quivercdn.com/covers/harvill-secker/jim-crumley/the-company-of-swans_978-17-8730-062-0-97a9f975.jpg?v=2026-09-21%2003%3A09%3A05)

- Book: [The Company of Swans](https://www.bookquiver.com/jim-crumley/the-company-of-swans) ([The Company of Swans.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/jim-crumley/the-company-of-swans.md))
- Authors: [James Crumley](https://www.bookquiver.com/jim-crumley)
- Publisher: Harvill Secker
- ISBN: 978-17-8730-062-0
- Pages: 48
- Published: 2017-11-30
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next. ‘A small mound on white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.’ With these words, and those that follow, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring witness to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than that pyre of white feathers. Crumley watches, year in year out, as a pair of mute swans struggles, against the odds, to raise young on a wild patch of lock. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators; and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. Until comes the day when a third swan, stronger and younger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch. This journal of a swan-watcher, as he calls himself, is an elegy to these noble creatures; and most poignantly it is a memorial to one swan, whose silent drama he has recorded.