The Bird Skinner

Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winner Alice Greenway's new novel is a story of love, war, and remembrance centering on an irascible ornithologist who served his country in an unusual capacity in the Solomon Islands in the 1940s.

Jim Carroway was once a noted ornithologist, collecting and skinning birds as specimens for the Museum of Natural History, in New York. Slowing down now from a hard-lived life and a recent leg amputation, Jim retreats to an island in Maine to be alone, drink, smoke, and nurse his condition. Isolated by choice, Jim thinks back to his youth and his time working for Naval Intelligence during World War II in the Solomon Islands. While spying on the Japanese army for Admiral Halsey, Jim befriended Tosca, a young islander who worked with him as a scout there. Now, thirty years later, Tosca has sent his daughter Cadillac to stay with Jim in the weeks before she begins premedical studies at Yale. She arrives to Jim's great consternation. She will capture his heart and that of everyone she meets.

In a novel as riveting as Corelli's Mandolin or The English Patient, Greenway delivers an astonishing story of youth, lost love, war, and rebirth.