The Beauty Part

The novel starts inside the plane. Eighty minutes into the flight, just as the jet curves over the Gulf of Maine toward Nova Scotia and the moonlit Atlantic, a few passengers sense that something's wrong. The lights flicker. There's "a curious chemical smell, not exactly burning, more like a dashboard left to bake in the sun." The narrator, an ornithologist, babbles on about birds until his seatmate, a cellist, tells him to shut up. She knows what's coming; she writes her name--in lipstick--on her arm. The plane shudders, shakes, tumbles, explodes. And disappears into the sea.

A plane crash. No survivors. And the main character of the novel with the metaphor-drenched title is the ornithologist's wife, another ornithologist. Who then travels to an inn on Trachis Island, off Nova Scotia, to identify his remains, if any. Man-made birds. Birds in nature. Birds as mythic figures. So many birds you brace yourself for a novel so sensitive you're really not deep enough to read it.

But it's better than that, much better. It traces grief minute by minute, making sad stories into a page-turner. The writer is Brad Kessler. The book is Birds in Fall.