Best Novel of the last year: The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus) is a wonderful, true novel of Newfoundland, which is all the more surprising in that its author is not a Newfoundlander. But clearly he spent enough time there to learn the language, for he writes in the first person, which is a great risk, and he succeeds wonderfully. The result is a story of a relentless unfolding of life and love and unforetold death—carried in the sweetest prose imaginable, a deceptively plain-looking English that, as you begin to listen to it, brings its own melodies to the ear, and rhythms that seem like memory itself.
