Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

As the search for survivors envelops the island, the mourning families gather at the inn, waiting for news of those they have lost. Here among strangers, and watched over by innkeeper Kevin Gearns, they form an unusual community, struggling for comfort and consolation. A Taiwanese couple sets out fruit for their daughter's ghost. A Bulgarian man plays piano in the dark, sending the music to his lost wife, a cellist. Two Dutch teenagers, a brother and sister, rage against their parents' death. An Iranian exile, mourning his niece, recites the Persian tales that carry the wisdom of centuries.

At the center of Birds in Fall lies Ana Gathreaux, whose story Brad Kessler tells with deep compassion: from her days in the field with her husband, observing and banding migratory birds, to her enduring grief and gradual reengagement with life.

Kessler's knowledge of the natural world, music, and myth enriches every page of this hauntingly beautiful and moving novel about solitude, love, losing your way, and finding something like home.

Average Customer Rating:

Wonderful Read!	Customer Rating:
I read this book while sitting by the fireside in my remote cabin in Alaska. The language is poetic and the characters Brad Kessler painted were so detailed as to become my friends. I really could not put the book down. There were so many levels of insight into human emotions, scientific knowledge about bird migration, lovely caring characters. It's a keeper to share with others.

Sad but amazingly beautiful	Customer Rating:
A friend recommended this book and I found it beautifully written. It is a tragic story of a plane crash and the families of the victims some of whom come together on the small Nova Scotian island to grieve for their lost loved ones. One of the dead is an orinthologist as is his grieving wife and birds and their migrating habits play into the story. It would be a great book club read.

disappointed potential

Customer Rating:

I just read this for a book club, and feel that most of the glowing reviews for it are greatly overblown. The prose is mostly quite lovely, and Kessler has created a fine assortment of characters whose responses to the trauma of losing loved ones in a plane crash are plausible enough. But good fiction requires more than realistic depictions of fictional characters and some nice prose. It requires a compelling *story* or *significance*, and in the end those are what this book lacks. The many classical analogies and musical references (e.g., the book is in 23 sections, to mirror Strauss's "Metamorphoses for 23 solo strings") utlimately have no payoff. So while it made me feel smart because I knew about the Ceyx/Alcyone myth and who the women of Trachis were and which Auden poem was being quoted, there didn't seem to be any narrative purpose for my knowing any of these things, since these allusions had no obvious resonance within the novel. Even as a trauma narrative, the book doesn't say very much about trauma; it simply depicts it. While it is an accomplishment to do so plausibly (hence the 3-star rating), I know plenty of trauma victims whose real-life stories I can hear if I want that sort of thing. A trauma novel needs to say something more about grief and healing than that they happen over time and in different ways for different people, which is pretty much all this book says about the matter.

Bird in Fall	Customer Rating:
This is one of the best crafted books I have recently read. Multi-cultures' common denominators of commitment, finiteness, compassion and love all explored and well defined. Kessler is a real story-teller that keeps the reader engaged.

Powerful Storytelling	Customer Rating:
Brad Kessler's novel is exquisitely written. Every word is a gem-so carefully crafted to evoke his translation of the human condition-how families interweaving lives are transformed in the wake of tragedy.