Ocean State Libraries

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review

Julian Barnes playfully combines...

Lyman, a thirty-year-old orphan, is sipping coffee on the front steps of the trailer he calls home one morning, when a ninety-year-old parrot arrives with a mysterious past and beakful of cryptic sayings -- such as "That which hath wings shall tell the matter." Convinced that heeding the bird's wisdom will lead him to answers about himself he so desperately seeks, Lyman combines his night job as a courtesy patrolman, circling the highway that loops...

Harry's legacy from his great-uncle, a talking parrot, proves tobe a much more exciting gift than he ever imagined.

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured the golden age of comic books, interwining history, legend and story-telling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to create a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that re-imagines the classic 19th-century detective story. In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year old man, vaguely recollected by the locals...

"Kay Powell, theatrical agent to non-human animals, is babysitting--that is, birdsitting--her client, a parrot named Barney, on the set of his new TV show, Dead City. When the show's charismatic star is shot in his trailer between scenes, the only eyewitness to the crime is--you guessed it--Barney. And even though Kay keeps explaining that even a "talking" parrot doesn't actually converse with people, the investigators insist on interrogating the...

"The week of her wedding, the bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother. In the days that follow, the bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the...

"Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at thiscomplex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others,...

"Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot." --

"Inheriting her great-uncle Louis's bayside souvenir shop should have been a breeze for Glory. Instead it's been one headache after another--with a lot of them generated by Bluebeard, a parrot with a mouth like a sailor and a personality a lot like her late great-uncle. But Glory's troubles pale in comparison to those of her best friend Karen, whose ex may still have the personalized key chain to her heart, but whose brother-in-law is about to get...

"Typing up positive-thought messages for a self-help guru isn't exactly Daphne's idea of dream job. But to regain custody of her nine-year-old son, she's willing to try. A few weeks later, when that same self-help guru asks her to take care of 100 endangered parrots, Daphne is willing to try that too. What ensues is a hilarious, heartbreaking tragicomedy involving the love of her life, the landlady from hell, three house painters, a flock of passenger...