Bird Suit

By (author): Sydney Hegele

A tourist town folk tale of stifled ambition, love, loss, and the bird women who live beneath the lake.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don’t see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don’t want Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years on, the peaches are ripening again, the tourists have returned, and Georgia is looking for trouble with any ill-tempered man she can find. When that man turns out to be Arlo Bloom—her mother’s ex and the new priest in town—she finds herself drawn into a complicated matrix of friendship, grief, faith, sex, and love with Arlo, his wife, Felicity, and their son, Isaiah. Vivid, uncanny, and as likely cursed as touched by grace, Bird Suit is a brutal, generous story as sticky and lush as a Port Peter peach.

AUTHOR

Sydney Hegele

Sydney Hegele (née Brooman) (they/them) was raised in Grimsby, Ontario. They attended Western University in London, Ontario, and currently live in Toronto. The Pump is their debut short fiction collection. Their story “The Bottom” was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s 2020 Open Season Awards, and they have recent work in American Chordata, Thorn Literary Magazine, and other literary journals.


Awards

  • Trillium Award 2022, Short-listed
  • ReLit Award for Short Fiction 2022, Winner
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    Details

    Dimensions:

    272 Pages
    8.0in * 5.0in * 0.5in
    10gr

    Published:

    May 07, 2024

    ISBN:

    9781778430428

    Language:

    eng

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    Other books by Sydney Hegele

    The Pump

    By (author): Sydney Hegele