The Bird Skinner

(, Main)

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Description

Thirty years after the end the Second World War, veteran Jim Carroway has retreated to his beach house on Fox Island, off the coast of Maine. With only the birdsong and his battered copy of Treasure Island for company, Jim's sole visitors are those who bring his weekly supplies of whisky, cigarettes and writing paper. Jim hides away from his former life as a renowned ornithologist, but also deep, darker truths: the death of his wife, and the bloody days he spent fighting the war in the Pacific. But the past looms ever larger - the beauty and tumult of the tiny Solomon Island of Layla, and the unlikely friendship he formed there with a young man named Tosca; and the days they spent skinning birds, and hunting and murdering Japanese soldiers. Summer comes to Maine, and Jim receives a visitor from Layla with the unlikely name of Cadillac. She is Tosca's daughter, and her presence is unwelcome as the tide of recollections that trail in her wake. Slowly, and despite his efforts to resist, Jim discovers that this young woman is a balm; that there is pleasure as well as sorrow in friendship, and in the memories of a life punctuated by adventure, love and war.

Reviews

Alice Greenway creates intensely believable characters who come from other places and other times. The Solomon Islands become characters as rich and three-dimensional as any other. She captures so well the unsleeping tragedies of the past, and how these bear in upon the present. -- Helen Dunmore
Enriching and engrossing... The book is bursting with fascinating, detailed knowledge, worn lightly. The narrative, beautifully crafted and plotted, navigates ingeniously through layers of past and present and the intertwining echoes of each. * Scotland on Sunday *
Greenway avoids the cliches of an unlikely friendship by writing with sensitivity about loss, nature and war, as Jim confronts his past. * The Independent *
Greenway deals with her characters with such sensitivity and understanding that the emotional payoff, which there is, feels justly earned. * Sunday Herald *
The Bird Skinner is a dark and moving tale of war, loss, corruption and violence. * Guardian *

Author Bio

Alice Greenway is an American who grew up in Hong Kong. As the daughter of a foreign correspondent she also lived in Bangkok, Jerusalem and the United States. She now lives in Scotland with her family. Her first novel, White Ghost Girls, was longlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.