One fall night, an innkeeper on a remote island in Nova Scotia watches an airplane plummet to the sea. 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, 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. Two Dutch teenagers 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 this striking novel is Ana Gathreaux, an ornithologist who specializes in bird migration, and whose husband perished on the flight. What unfolds is the story of how these families unite and disperse in the wake of the tragedy, and how their interweaving lives are ultimately transformed. Brad Kessler's knowledge of the natural world, music, and myth enriches every page. "A dramatic and strikingly poetic novel of nature's glory and humankind's imagination." -- Chicago Tribune "Shockingly beautiful...Kessler takes our breath away." -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Migratory birds flutter through Brad Kessler's elegant new novel, an avian metaphor for the strength of the human spirit." -- The Economist "Some books get better with rereading. Brad Kessler's lyrical Birds in Fall is one of them. Birds in flight and humans in free fall are this novel's engines of grace." -- O, The Oprah Magazine "A tender, contemplative, lyrical novel." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Exquisite and erudite...a luminous tribute to Kessler's abiding and respectful faith in the power of storytelling." -- Los Angeles Times Brad Kessler’s novel Birds in Fall won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His other books include Lick Creek and The Woodcutter’s Christmas . His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB , as well as other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Birds in Fall A Novel By Brad Kessler Scribner Copyright © 2007 Brad Kessler All right reserved. ISBN: 9780743287395 ONE It's true: a few of us slept through the entire ordeal, but others sensed something wrong right away. We grew restless in our seats and felt what exactly? An uneasiness, a movement in the air, a certain quiet that hadn't been there before? Several men craned their necks about the cabin. We caught each other's eyes, exchanged searching looks, and just as quickly -- embarrassed -- glanced away. We were eighty minutes into the flight. Orion on our left, the bear to the right. The motors droned. The cabin lights dimmed. The whoosh of the engines was the sound of erasure: Shhhhh, they whispered, and we obeyed. The woman beside me clicked on her overhead light and adjusted a pair of reading glasses. She laid a folder of sheet music on her tray. Thin, black-haired, she smelled vaguely of breath mints. Her blue cello case lay strapped to the seat between us. She was giving a concert in Amsterdam and had booked an extra ticket for her instrument. I'd joked about her cello on the tarmac: Did she order special meals for it on flights? Did it need a headset, a pillow? She was retying hair behind her head and cast me a barely tolerant smile. When the drink cart passed, she ordered a Bloody Mary -- I, a scotch. Our pygmy bottles arrived with roasted nuts. I reached across the cello case and touched her plastic cup. To your cello, I tried again. Does it have a name? She nodded tepidly over the rims of her glasses. Actually, she said, it does. I couldn't place her accent. Something Slavic. Romanian perhaps. She wore a lot of eye shadow. She returned to her music. I could just make out the title of the piece: Richard Strauss's Metamorphoses: A Study for Twenty-three Solo Strings. Over the Gulf of Maine, the moon glittered below us. I wanted to point out to the cellist as I would to my wife, Ana, that the moon hung actually beneath us. I wanted to tell her we were near the tropopause, the turning point between the stratosphere and the troposphere, where the air is calm and good for flying; tropo from "turning," pauso from "stop" (I prided myself on my college Latin). And surely she'd know these musical terms. But the woman was counting bars now. Across the aisle, a man in a wine-colored sweater lay snoring, his mouth opened wide. Somewhere over the Bay of Fundy the cabin lights began to flicker. The video monitors went dead (they'd been showing a map of the Atlantic, with our speed, altitude, and outside temperature). The cellist looked up for a moment, her lips still moving with the sheet music. Then the cabin fell entirely dark, and a strange silvery light poured into the plane through ea