An Affair with Grouse

I started listening to *An Affair with Grouse* expecting another dry treatise on upland game birds. What I got was a voice inside my head—Evans’s voice—that sounded like my grandfather after three whiskeys, explaining why his old pointer was the smartest creature he’d ever met. Spencer nails that tone: gravelly, affectionate, and just short of cantankerous. He doesn’t perform the prose so much as he inhabits it, letting Evans’s dry wit land like a well-placed shot. The audiobook shines in the field scenes, where Spencer speeds up just enough to mimic the breathlessness of a hunt, then slows to a crawl when Evans pauses to admire a grouse’s feather patterns. My only complaint? The transition between chapters occasionally feels abrupt, like the editor hit ‘next’ mid-sentence. Evans’s obsession with grouse borders on the religious—he draws them obsessively, paints them obsessively, and talks about them like they’re the only bird that ever mattered. There’s a streak of snobbery here, too: Evans dismisses pheasant hunters with a sniff and barely tolerates woodcock. That elitism is part of the charm, though, because it feels honest, not performative. This isn’t a book for casual listeners. It’s for people who’ve gotten lost in the woods chasing a bird they’ll never eat or for those who’ve stayed up sketching a ruffed grouse at 2 a.m. because it refused to sit still. Spencer and Evans together make a compelling case: if you’re going to love a bird, love it like an affair.