Hens can be fun visitors, when they gossip and sunbathe and pop inside for a chat, but they can outstay their welcome and tackling them to send them home isn’t easy. They aren’t the only creatures in the pages of this book – there’s Ursula the golden-eyed cat, a leporine emperor, singing mice and all the swallows! Then there are the people who interact with them: an entomologist in love with the spiders he observes, a builder who releases a trapped mouse, a woman who attracts bees as a flower does – and Mary and the hens, of course.

Mary McCallum is a writer and publisher who lives in the Wairarapa and Pōneke. Her own published work includes award-winning novel The Blue; a poetry book XYZ of Happiness and a children’s novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish. She won the inaugural Caselburg Trust International Poetry Prize and her poem ‘Sycamore Tree’ was selected for Best NZ Poems. She is a director of Mākaro Press and The Cuba Press.