I Heard That

Meet Professor Galileo Feathers.

He hears everything. He understands everything. He catalogues everything. And he will repeat it, at full volume, to whoever happens to be in the room, at whatever moment seems most appropriate to him, which is frequently the worst possible moment for everyone else.

Known to his household as "Kiwi" (a name he finds reductive and allows only provisionally), Professor Galileo Feathers is the self-appointed archivist of everything that has ever been said, whispered, argued, laughed, or accidentally muttered within his range of hearing. Every phone call. Every kitchen conversation. Every fragment of television dialogue. Every word spoken in the quiet hours when the household believes no one is listening.

Someone is always listening.

I Heard That is the third book in the Life as a Pet series, narrated entirely by the parrot himself: a creature of exceptional vocabulary, encyclopedic memory, zero discretion, and an unshakeable conviction that he understands everything happening around him. He hears fragments and assembles them into complete pictures. The pictures are almost always wrong. He delivers them with the confidence of someone who has never once been wrong.

The result is a book about language, attention, and what it means to witness an entire family's life from a perch in the corner. About the chaos that comes from knowing all the words and not quite all the meanings. About a very small, very loud, very thorough creature who has been paying attention since the day he arrived and who has, in the course of all that paying attention, accumulated something far more valuable than intelligence.

Funny, warm, and surprisingly moving, I Heard That is a book for anyone who has ever loved something that expressed that love in the most inconvenient way possible.

Which is to say: it is a book for everyone.