The Bird Skinner - Softcover

Greenway writes poignantly about human relationships, war and the natural world. * Mail on Sunday * (A) thrilling, evocation of young love... as fresh as it is heartbreaking. With an attention to detail that's both poetic and precise. * New York Times * The Bird Skinner is a dark and moving tale of war, loss, corruption and violence. * Guardian * Greenway deals with her characters with such sensitivity and understanding that the emotional payoff, which there is, feels justly earned. * Sunday Herald * Greenway avoids the cliches of an unlikely friendship by writing with sensitivity about loss, nature and war, as Jim confronts his past. * The Independent * 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 * 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

It is 1973. Jim Kennoway, a distinguished ornithologist and Second World War veteran, has just left his work at the Natural History Museum in New York, turned his back on his family and retreated to an island boathouse off the coast of Maine. His desires are simple: to be left alone with his cigarettes, gin and battered copy of Treasure Island, and to forget. Jim's solitude is shattered when Cadillac Baketi, a tall, ebullient and dazzlingly bright young woman from the Solomon Islands arrives on her way to study medicine at Yale University. Cadillac is the daughter of Tosca, an island scout Jim befriended during the war when they collected and skinned birds while spying on the Japanese. Jim curses the intrusion as he finds his thoughts catapulting back to his youth and a dark truth about his time in the Solomons. Yet it may be that Cadillac, from the Pacific islands Jim thought he'd left behind, can teach him to be human again.