Jackdaw Affliction

by S.G. Hyde

Memory is a tricky thing. Reality is fragile. And the past never stays buried.

From bike rides through the suburbs of 1980s Hampshire to the claustrophobic grind of adulthood, Billy Cooper’s life is shaped by loss, fractured family ties, and the creeping onset of a degenerative disease. As his body betrays him and grief corrodes what remains, Billy turns inward—into recollections that blur, narratives that contradict, and personas that may never have existed.

Jackdaw Affliction is a descent into memory’s labyrinth, where trauma, illness, and longing distort the line between truth and invention. Told with brutal honesty, warped humour and hallucinatory edge, S. G. Hyde’s novel explores what it means to live when the ground of reality keeps shifting beneath your feet.

At once harrowing and tender, it is a story of survival through imagination, self-deception, and the desperate human need to stitch meaning out of chaos. A haunting meditation on identity, illness, and loss, sprinkled with dark comedy, this is fiction at its most unsettling and raw.

270 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 3, 2026

About the author

SG (Sam Gavin) Hyde is an author based in Exeter-UK. He is a passionate advocate for disability services and serves as a trustee at Disability Together. Living with Cerebellar Ataxia, he champions resilience in others. After a 20-year business career ended unexpectedly, he dedicates himself to personal growth through exercise, mindfulness, and seizing new opportunities. His passions include live theatre, music, nature conservation, and rugby. At home, he shares his journey with house bunnies and his wife. Discover more or sign up for his newsletter at www.SGHYDE.com

Reviews

[Marcus Batterbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jackdaw Affliction draws the reader in from the very first page. I really enjoyed each character and the way that they experience and perceive everyday life. Hyde explores both the complexity and simplicity of modern life for a group of people whose lives are intertwined in a very real and familiar way. I found many points I could relate to throughout the book, and I also learnt a great deal from Billy, the main protagonist, who takes us on a a journey into living with an illness that profoundly impacts him and the people around. This book is real, funny and profound. A very good read that will keep you turning the page.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this.

What attracted me to this book was the description. I have never read a book about someone with ataxia. Throughout the book, you follow the life of Billy, who is diagnosed with ataxia. During the book, Billy loses control not only of his body but also of his mind. The book is an easy read and is divided into specific phases of Billy's life. This book was certainly worthwhile; it was interesting to read a different perspective and learn about this.

[Dr. Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

🧠 A mind coming apart at the seams
🏚️ Blue collar English boyhood, rough around all the edges
💔 A marriage holding together through sheer devotion
🌀 Unreliable narrator with memory that can't be trusted
😔 Illness as slow erasure of everything a man thought he was
⚠️ Dark sexual content throughout, including some deeply disturbing implications
😴 Second half loses its footing and takes you down with it

📚 Shelf Placement

Elegy for a Shifting World

💭 Personal Reflections

S.G. Hyde can write. That's the first thing to say and it matters, because this review is going to get complicated and I don't want that to get lost. His prose has a blunt, matter-of-fact quality that works really well in the early sections. There's great texture here. The way music runs through the book like background noise from another room. The specificity of growing up working class in 1980s Hampshire. Excellent bones. I hope he writes another novel because he has real talent.

Billy Cooper is the kind of narrator who is genuinely hard to spend time with and I mean that as partial praise. He's a man whose entire identity is built around being capable, sexual, independent, physical. And then he gets cerebellar ataxia, a progressive degenerative condition that systematically takes all of those things away from him. His gait goes. Then his coordination. Then his vision. Then his voice. At some point he revises the story of his own life to stay ahead of what he's losing. The unreliable narration isn't just a literary device here... it's the psychological mechanism of a man who cannot look directly at what is happening to him so lives in delusion instead.

That's a genuinely interesting premise and there are moments where it works. The scene where he tries to paint the ceiling and can't hold the roller up. Using a walking stick for the first time. His wife Cate telling him it looks great when they both know it doesn't. Those moments are quiet and real.

Unfortunately the book also makes some choices that I found genuinely hard to understand and harder to excuse. Billy's relationship to sex and sexuality is relentless throughout... We live in his head and are bombarded constantly with who he's slept with, who he wants to sleep with, his encounters with sex workers, when he has a hard on, his pet name for his penis, detailed physical descriptions that go on well past the point of characterization.

This makes sense to a degree. Sexuality is one of the pillars of his identity that the illness threatens, so of course it's preoccupying. But for that to work, the sex content needs to work for the movement of the story. For me, that meant feeling strong distaste for the man we are living inside for most of the book (the majority of the story is told from his POV). If the goal is for the reader (at least for me as a woman) to feel disgust, then the author nailed it. That said, I'm not confident that is the goal, and I think we needed more help to find empathy for this narrator.

The structure drops something important in the second half too. The early sections give us other POVs and those anchor us.They give us somewhere to stand when his narration becomes unreliable. By the second half those outside perspectives almost disappear entirely, and we're left alone inside a deteriorating mind, preoccupied with sex, with nothing to hold onto. That might have been intentional. But it mostly just felt exhausting and alienating rather than immersive to me. Left alone with his hatred toward his wife and in-laws and his sexual obsession for the last half of the book there was no relief or anchor and I found myself losing interest.

The blurb promises brutal honesty, dark comedy, and tenderness. The dark comedy didn't land for me. The tenderness exists in the sections told from his wife's POV but these are limited. What I actually read was something relentlessly bleak in a way that left me asking what the point was.

Hyde is a good writer who needed a much heavier editorial hand. I'm left wondering if this had gone through a traditional publishing house with a strong developmental editor if I'd be giving this 5 stars. I think it could have been something really amazing. As it stands it's a book with real ability behind it that got away from itself.

🌈 Representation

Billy is a white disabled British man and his disability is central — cerebellar ataxia, progressive, degenerative, and feels real, deep and raw.

Characters of color exist at the margins. Asha and Dwight, a presumably Black British couple (based on clothing references), appear at their own wedding and then mainly as background in Billy's life events. They have no interiority in the text worth speaking of.

The Asian women in this book are a more serious problem. These women appear as sex workers Billy visits, as props in what may or may not be a sex tourism narrative, or as Noo — a Thai woman he gets pregnant who gets quietly packed off to her sister's so she doesn't inconvenience the men on holiday. None of these women have inner lives in the text. They are entirely instrumental to Billy's story, which given the book's themes around male entitlement and the objectification of women, may be intentional. But intentional or not, it's uncomfortable and worth naming.

🔍 Tropes & Power Lens

This is a book about what happens to male identity when the body fails. Billy's sense of self is entirely externally constructed — competence, physical capability, sexuality, independence. He has no interior resources for loss so when the illness takes those things, he copes through delusion. He misremembers. He invents people and narratives that preserve his self-image. Very plausible from a psychological standpoint. I do wish there was a little more grounding in it earlier. In the last half of the book we're left with his POV almost exclusively which for me made him less likeable and the story less interesting than if we had maintained more connection with other POV characters. I believe this was done to make the delusions a "twist" which I don't think the book needed.

But the book is also carrying a much darker thread that it never fully commits to examining.

Billy's relationship to sexuality is shaped early and badly. His grandmother catches him masturbating as a boy and calls him a pervert .. and she becomes "the Witch" in his mind from that point forward, monstrous and threatening. That shame never gets processed. It just goes underground and resurfaces in how he relates to women for the rest of his life: objectifying, entitled, preoccupied, unable to see women as fully present people rather than surfaces.

Then there's his sister Becks. The book includes a scene from his mother's perspective in which she discovers her older teenage children naked together, masturbating, in a bedroom. Becks subsequently gets pregnant at 18 and disappears, ostensibly with a boyfriend. But by the end of the book Billy has decided the child is his, and that the child's disability — a wheelchair — is the genetic condition passed down through him. Becks eventually blocks him on Facebook. The book never confirms if it's his child or not. It can't, because we're inside an unreliable narrator and there aren't other POVs used to give us insight. But it plants the implication and then leaves it sitting there without doing anything with it.

Incest is a very heavy thing to introduce into a literary novel about illness and memory... Incest, an unwanted pregnancy, a disabled child, a sister who disappears and eventually cuts contact. The book doesn't provide enough scaffolding around this storyline to do anything with it. It's not used to help us understand who Billy is, and we never actually know what really happened because he's unreliable. I'm left not truly understanding the point of the storyline.

The Thailand sections add another layer. Billy narrates repeated trips with his father where they visit sex workers together. But later information suggests his father may never have been on those trips at all; Billy went with a friend. Which means either someone else introduced him to sex tourism, or he's rewritten those memories to make them more palatable, or both. There's also the question of whether he got a woman in Thailand pregnant, which would be another child he has lost or abandoned without acknowledging.

For these sex scenes to work we needed grounding from other POVs to help the reader make sense of Billy. Because of his shifting reality and unreliable nature, combined with the gravity of the topics introduced in the story, the reader is left holding a lot of trauma. As a female reader I almost felt like I was doing emotional labor for this male character in reading the story.

The women around Billy — Cate especially — are not treated well by the narrative. Billy's attitude toward women shifts dramatically in the second half of the book from excessive devotion to contempt, and the book attributes this loosely to medication side effects or ataxia without ever really examining it. To me a more interesting story would have connected it to his sexual shame early on. Meanwhile Cate stays in the marriage and adapts and the book spends more time describing her appearance than her experience.

⚠️ Content Warnings

Content warnings are non-exhaustive and reflect what stood out to me as a reader.

Progressive degenerative illness and disability. Explicit sexual content throughout. Implied incest and sexual abuse. Pregnancy loss. Child sexual exploitation (witnessed, not perpetrated by protagonist). Sex work. Domestic violence (witnessed). Alcohol dependency. Cognitive decline. Grief. Implied infant death. Infidelity.

⭐ Rating:

⭐⭐⭐

⭐ 1 star: Did not work for me
⭐⭐ 2 stars: Had real problems
⭐⭐⭐ 3 stars: Decent but didn't quite land
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars: Solid and enjoyable, some reservations
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 stars: Loved it, highly recommend

BookShrink ratings reflect my personal reading experience and apply to books read from 2025 onward.

Thank you to Atmosphere Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Literary Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jackdaw Affliction is a literary novel with the sweep of a family saga and the bruised intimacy of psychological drama. It follows Billy from a rough-edged childhood in 1980s England through grief, family damage, love, illness, and the slow tightening grip of ataxia, while also circling the lives of Becks, Susan, and Will in ways that make the family feel less like a cast and more like a weather system that keeps changing around him. What stayed with me most is how the book moves from youthful freedom, bikes, music, and sibling closeness into something darker and more fragile, until survival itself becomes the central struggle.

Hyde writes in a way that feels unpolished in the best sense of the word, as if Billy is not performing pain for the reader but just trying to get it said before it slips away. That gives the novel a blunt force that I found hard to shake. Some scenes land because they are so matter-of-fact, even when what is happening is shocking or sad. The early sections especially have that mix of memory and menace, where a summer day, a pub garden, a family dinner, or a bike ride can turn in an instant. I also liked how music runs through the book like a private radio station in the background, giving the story texture without feeling gimmicky.

What I found most interesting, and at times most unsettling, was Hyde’s willingness to let the story stay messy. This is not a neat novel, and I do not think it wants to be. The family bonds are loving, warped, tender, and destructive all at once. Later, when Billy’s world narrows under disability and humiliation, the book becomes less about plot in the usual sense and more about endurance, dignity, resentment, and the strange loneliness of being trapped inside a body that no longer lets you move through the world the way you once did. That material could have turned preachy or sentimental, but it mostly doesn’t. It feels authentic. Candid. Sometimes ugly. And sometimes very moving.

I would recommend Jackdaw Affliction most to readers who like literary fiction that takes risks, especially books about family damage, class, memory, and chronic illness that are more interested in emotional truth than polish. Anyone looking for a clean, comforting read may bounce off it. I didn’t always find it easy, but I did find it memorable, and that counts for a lot. It feels like a novel for readers who can sit with discomfort and still listen for the human voice underneath it.

[Scarlet · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Jackdaw Affliction, Billy takes us through the memories of his life, from his troubled working-class upbringing through to the cruel realities of living with an incurable degenerative disease, ataxia. Through inconsistencies in his tales and interjection of his families' memories, we quickly learn that Billy may not be remembering things quite the way that his family and others do.

I absolutely loved this book. I had to force myself to go to bed after reading for hours. It's one of those books that captivates the highs and lows of life really well, including love, grief, illness, family, sex and relationships.

You know you've written a book well when you invoke an emotional response from your readers. I was especially drawn to Janet and Mike. I wanted to reach through the book and smack them for their attitudes and how they treated Billy (in the best way possible). I feel like everyone knows a Janet-and-Mike-type. They were like a guilty pleasure; I know I shouldn't like them but they made for a brilliant read.

The structure of the book makes it interesting to read. It is divided into five sections, and then subdivided into the time and people speaking. Mostly, we follow Billy but occasionally we hear from his wife and family. We quickly learn that we cannot trust Billy as a narrator as he spirals into delusion. Slowly, you piece together the truth of the matter and when you read the final few pages, everything comes together in the most satisfying way.

On a more serious note, I found the parts of the novel centred around ataxia both emotional and educational. It was fascinating and humbling to have insight into a character that lives with this chronic illness. I think the book does really well to raise awareness for this condition.

This book is gritty and compelling. Once you get that first, 'huh?' moment, you will be gripped to the very end. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes an intentionally messy book with an unreliable narrator.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this fantastic ARC to review.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was...interesting. While there is something to be said for being able to write in a way that mimics the degeneration of the mind, it does make reading it a little difficult. There were a few times where I found myself questioning what was happening, what was truth, and if something made sense. This is obviously supposed to help showcase Billy's decline but I wish it was a little easier to follow. The end did help shed some clarity on the situation which was good.
I did enjoy the way the book was laid out, almost like reading a journal. This breakup of thoughts made reading a little easier. I think had it been written like a traditional book, I would have struggled much more with reading. There is an audience this type of writing would appeal to, and while I am not that audience, I do have an appreciation for the work that had to go into writing a book with such a difficult subject.

[James Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic piece of work, this is a book full of rollercoasters love, despair, grief every emotion you can think of being disabled myself I could relate to this book and I think this should be read by people with disabilities carers husbands wives anybody that has gone through some kind of pain in their life. The author has put so much work into this I could not recommend it enough and the author has also listed a playlist and you can listen to the track and it will give people an understanding of what was going through the main characters head at the time which was a nice touch as well I cannot wait until this authors next book, is out

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

An emotional rollercoaster of a story, showcasing the highs and lows in Billy's life as he discovers he has ataxia and the impact it has on his life and those closest to him. Highlighting the physical and mental obstacles life places in front of Billy over the years and how he copes with them, making it a very interesting read.