Winner of the 2019 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Women's Fiction; Finalist for Literary Fiction

Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba. Within the context of their friendship, Ivy's past begins to unravel from a long-held silence, just as Kate finds herself confronting her relationship with the colourful community she's known all her life, along with an unexpected visitor who threatens to remove all peace from her chosen refuge. Told from the perspectives of three narrators: Ivy, Kate, and Kate's mother Nora, Fishing for Birds is a novel that juxtaposes the expectations we cling to so fiercely and the unexpected and sometimes unconventional things that turn up. The novel challenges traditional constructs of time, ethnicity, and relationship. Set against the tropical beauty of 1920s Cuba and the Northwest Coast of contemporary time, both the landscape and unique character of island life underscore the experiences of three very different women.

Linda Quennec is a writer, traveller, and PhD student in Depth Psychology. An island-dweller at heart, she took inspiration for her novel Fishing for Birds from the natural beauty of Coastal British Columbia and the fascinating Isla de la Juventud (formerly Isla de Piños) where her German grandmother was raised. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Naropa University, and is a graduate of The Writers' Studio at Simon Fraser University and The Humber School of Writing. Her work has appeared in Quills Canadian Poetry, 3Elements Review, Cirque, Emerge, and DoveTales literary journals. She lives with her husband and twin daughters just outside Vancouver, British Columbia.

Linda Quennec's profile page

• Winner, American Book Fest Best Book Awards (Women's Fiction)
• Short-listed, American Book Fest Best Book Awards (Literary Fiction)

"...Quennec's expert prose quietly glides through highs and lows, seamlessly alternating between modern-day British Columbia and the colorful summer of 1926 on a tropical Cuban quay."
--US Review of Books

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"[The] novel offers an astute examination of the despair engendered by solitude and of the paradoxical consolations it delivers."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Sharp, visceral, storytelling from Linda Quennec, a confident new voice in Canadian novel-writing."
--Sarah Sheard, author of Krank, Almost Japanese, and other novels