Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment--dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.]

Eoghan Walls is a Northern Irish poet. He has lived and worked in Ireland, Britain, Germany and Rwanda. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, and his poetry has been shortlisted for multiple international awards, including the Bridport Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Piggott Prize. He has published the first major translation of Heidegger’s poetical works and currently teaches Creative Writing at Lancaster University. The Gospel of Orla (Seven Stories Press; 2023), his debut novel, was an IndieNext and a Library Reads selection, and was called "utterly convincing and fresh and original" by Colm Tóibín. His new novel is Field Notes from an Extinction.

Walls will be in conversation with Leeya Mehta, whose novel, Extinction, is forthcoming with Simon and Schuster, India (October 6 2026). She is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, podcaster and essayist, widely published in the US, India, UK, and Austria, including in the Times of India, Poetry London, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Red Hen Press’s Future Work.