The Bird Artist

Finalist, National Book Awards 1994 for Fiction

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman book cover
ISBN 978-0374113308
Farrar Straus & Giroux
Howard Norman author photo
Howard Norman

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Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime–a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women.

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