Its memorable characters will haunt you long after you put it down.”Ĭlaire Messud, award-winning author of The Woman Upstairs “Taut and true, A Catalog of Birds is a beautiful book about family, loss and love. As Billy struggles to regain the life he once had, Nell and their family will have to do all that’s possible to save him. The only survivor when his helicopter is shot down, he returns home so seriously wounded he may never use his right hand again. Billy, a passionate artist, enlists as a pilot to fulfill his lifelong dream of flying. Nell excels academically and is headed to college and a career in science. At the heart of the novel is the relationship between siblings Nell and Billy Flynn. Harrington has twice won both the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award and the Clauder Competition for best new play in New England.Ī Catalog of Birds, her new novel, published by Europa Editions, is set in 1970, a watershed moment in American history, A Catalog of Birds tells the story of the Flynn family and the devastating impact of the Vietnam War. She is the 2008 Kleban Award Winner for most promising librettist in American Musical Theatre. Laura Harrington's award-winning plays, musicals, and operas have been widely produced across America, in Canada, and Europe in venues ranging from off-off-Broadway to Houston Grand Opera. At once universal and very personal, Alice Bliss is a transforming story about those who are left at home during wartime, and a teenage girl bravely facing the future. These characters' struggles amidst uncertain times echo our own, lending the novel an immediacy and poignancy that is both relevant and real. But the smell of Matt is starting to fade from his blue shirt that Alice wears everyday, and the phone calls are never long enough.Īlice Bliss is a profoundly moving coming-of-age novel about love and its many variations-the support of a small town looking after its own love between an absent father and his daughter the complicated love between an adolescent girl and her mother and an exploration of new love with the boy-next-door. Alice will learn to drive, join the track team, go to her first dance, and fall in love, all while trying to be strong for her mother, Angie, and take care of her precocious little sister, Ellie.

Matt will miss seeing his daughter blossom from a tomboy into a full-blown teenager.

When he ships out, Alice is faced with finding a way to fill the emptiness he has left behind. Alice idolizes her father, loves working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball. When Alice Bliss learns that her father, Matt, is being deployed to Iraq, she's heartbroken.

Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington