THE IMPOSSIBLE THING

A generations-spanning saga of collectible eggs and the people in their orbit.

In the 1920s, on the cliffs of North Yorkshire, various gangs control the business of collecting seabird eggs, which can be quite lucrative. But at Metland Farm, it’s common knowledge that the edge of the cliff is too dangerous to scale. When Celie Sheppard, fatherless misfit, and Robert, the farmhand, find a way for her to descend through a crack in the rock, she finds a guillemot nest with one perfectly red egg, and for the next 30 years, she fetches one red egg a year for a special collector, George Ambler, who pays handsomely for the rarity. In the present time, in Wales, two men break into the house of a young man, Weird Nick, and his mother, tie them up, and steal an “old egg in a fancy wooden box” that Nick bought from eBay. Nick and his friend Patrick decide to do some sleuthing and see if they can get the egg back, because it’s clearly valuable. Their adventures bring them into direct contact with an egg expert, Dr. Christopher Connor; a militant member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; and an accused egg-stealer who has sacrificed all material comforts for his collection. Bauer interweaves Celie and Ambler’s story with Nick and Patrick’s adventures, and it’s a slow burn in the sense that it takes a while to understand both the scope of the novel and the significance of the “Metland Egg” because there’s a lot of switching back and forth between time periods and characters. But once it all begins to hit, the uniqueness of the world and the charm of the characters is undeniable. There’s a wistfulness, too, to the fact that in order to preserve something beautiful like this egg, the chick inside must die. As one character says, “Jeez…who knew the world of eggs was so cut-throat!”

Succeeds not only in its intricately balanced plot, but also in its emotional weight.