The Tender Birds

By Carole Giangrande

Matthew Reilly is a lonely priest haunted by secrets. Young Alison is the shy and devoted keeper of Daisy, a falcon that suffered an accident and can no longer fly. When they meet in a Boston parish, Matt tells Alison about the day a decade ago when he missed the plane out of Logan Airport that tore into one of the Twin Towers. What he hasn’t told her is that among the victims was a son that no one knew he’d fathered. With no confidantes and close to exhaustion, Matt suffers a heart attack, forcing him to reflect on what's become of his life. He recalls a teaching stint in Toronto a year earlier, his encounter with Gavin, a troubled and predatory man, and his discovery that his son had a male partner who had perished with him. He remembers returning to Boston, only to be perplexed by Alison and the affection that she and her beloved falcon draw from the homeless people who live on the Boston Common, but Matt has forgotten a momentary but fateful encounter with Alison eight years earlier in Toronto and it’s only when her falcon frightens a child in the parish that even Alison begins to recall her terrifying ordeal years ago as a homeless person in Toronto.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771336680

Carole Giangrande

Carole Giangrande’s two most recent books (the novellas Here Comes The Dreamer and Midsummer) were both published by Inanna. A previous novella, A Gardener On The Moon, won the 2010 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest. She’s the author of the novels, An Ordinary Star (2004) and A Forest Burning (2000) and a short story collection, Missing Persons (1994), as well as two non-fiction books: Down To Earth: The Crisis in Canadian Farming (1985) and The Nuclear North: The People, The Regions and the Arms Race (1983). She’s worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio, and her fiction, poetry, articles and reviews have appeared in literary journals and in Canada’s major newspapers.

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