The Impossible Bird
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
There is a place—a world—where famine and poverty do not exist.
Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind.
Is it Heaven?
As two brothers are about to discover,
it's more like Hell.
Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there's-no-success-like-excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned-down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war—an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten.
But all that is about to change.
One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun-wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is "the code." The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren't sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are simple: find your brother or die.
But what begins as a cross-country manhunt—brother converging on brother—turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected.
Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need?
For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of the impossible bird.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A zany premise, coupled with realistic characters drawn into a confusing reality, results in a tour de force that handles themes of death, loss and love with panache and a dash of humor. We begin and end with the death of the two main characters, Daniel Glynn, a literature professor, and his brother, Mike, a hotshot film director only they don't know they're dead. A mysterious stranger charges Daniel to find Mike, and holds Daniel's son, Sean, hostage to ensure his compliance. Meanwhile, Mike is set on the same path: to find Daniel. O'Leary (Door Number Three; The Gift) alternates between the points of view of Daniel and Mike as they traverse an increasingly bizarre landscape and slowly come to realize the truth: they're pawns in a game, with two factions at odds with one another, each with its own agenda to end the hideous, utopic "afterlife" they're trapped in, courtesy of aliens working through volunteer hummingbirds, or to preserve it. But Mike and Daniel are special: the aliens that control the afterlife have met them before, and now they have a connection with Sean. The author plays with language, but the nonstandard use of colons and his sentence fragments distract more than anything, although the prose is otherwise clear and direct. The complex structure and layering of textual clues (including an odd recurring character, a woman in a muumuu) allow the reader to make inferences before O'Leary fully clarifies events. The themes of love and loss resonate strongly in this deeply affecting book.
