The Birds and Other Stories
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First published in 1952 as The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories, this unsettling collection reveals Daphne du Maurier’s gift for turning familiar landscapes and ordinary lives into sources of dread. In “The Birds”, a Cornish family finds itself besieged by flocks whose inexplicable violence threatens the fragile order of everyday life; elsewhere, a neglected wife seems to return through an apple tree, and a remote mountain promises a disturbing form of immortality.
Across these stories, du Maurier moves between psychological suspense, Gothic horror and the uncanny, exposing the darkness beneath domestic routine, desire and human certainty. The natural world is never merely a backdrop, and the greatest terrors often arise from what remains unexplained. The collection’s title story inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated 1963 film, but the full range of du Maurier’s imagination emerges in these quieter, stranger tales, where menace gathers gradually and the familiar becomes profoundly alien.
From the book
“The east wind, like a razor, stripped the trees, and the leaves, crackling and dry, shivered and scattered with the wind’s blast.”
— Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
On The Birds and Other Stories
“A remarkable imagination continually provokes both pity and terror.”
— The Observer