In his debut monograph, *The Budgie Died Instantly*, Nik Roche presents a portrait of a community that is otherwise impenetrable. The book is the result of two years spent photographing after a chance befriending of a man who became a kind of guide. Published by Setanta Books in 2020, the hardback volume measures 170 x 235 mm, runs to 128 pages, and holds seventy images, two tip-ins, and a foreword by Niall Sweeney. The photographs are scattered with the debris of a domesticity that initially seems familiar, yet the more time we spend with them, the more perceptible the sound of this place becomes, and the more our presumptions are disoriented.

What distinguishes the project is the way Roche weaves his own imagery together with hand-written notes and transcribed conversations, creating an intimate, complex and multi-layered narrative rather than a portfolio. Letters, a shopping list, remembered conversations, and violent tales of self-affirmation all find their place. As the foreword suggests, the book reveals as much about us as it does its subject, peeling back overlapping skins of fear and desire. It finds warmth in the ache of day-to-day banality, held together by unspeakable bonds and a hand-me-down sense of threat, alongside love, compassion, incidental hope and the joy of familiar patterns.

For collectors, the significance lies in this formal restlessness. Roche uses the photobook as a medium for intimacy and disorientation that cannot be separated from its editing and sequencing. The edition of 500 and its status as a first monograph mark it as a body of work to watch rather than a retrospective trophy. It sits within a lineage of reportage that questions its own authority, and it does so with sustained attention to the structures of trust in kept animals and in the birds that offer release. This is a serious and quietly disorienting first book.

This is an edition of 500, published by Setanta Books in 2020.