The Crane Wife
Patrick Ness
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0143126172
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A magical novel, based on a Japanese folk tale, that imagines how the life of a broken-hearted man is transformed when he rescues an injured white crane that has landed in his backyard.
George Duncan is an American living and working in London. At forty-eight, he owns a small print shop, is divorced, and lonelier than he realizes. All of the women with whom he has relationships eventually leave him for being too nice. But one night he is woken by an astonishing sound—a terrific keening, which is coming from somewhere in his garden. When he investigates he finds a great white crane, a bird taller than even himself. It has been shot through the wing with an arrow. Moved more than he can say, George struggles to take out the arrow from the bird's wing, saving its life before it flies away into the night sky.
The next morning, a shaken George tries to go about his daily life, retreating to the back of his store and making cuttings from discarded books—a harmless, personal hobby—when through the front door of the shop a woman walks in. Her name is Kumiko, and she asks George to help her with her own artwork. George is dumbstruck by her beauty and her enigmatic nature, and begins to fall desperately in love with her. She seems to hold the potential to change his entire life, if he could only get her to reveal the secret of who she is and why she has brought her artwork to him.
Witty, magical, and romantic, The Crane Wife is a story of passion and sacrifice, that resonates on the level of dream and myth. It is a novel that celebrates the creative imagination, and the disruptive power of love.
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colder this winter seemed to be getting. ‘My daughter would very much like to meet you,’ he said to her as she opened the case. ‘The feeling is mutual,’ Kumiko said. ‘Perhaps if we have that party you were speaking of.’ ‘Yes,’ George said. ‘Okay, yes, then definitely, let’s–’ ‘It is a kind of story,’ she said, interrupting, but so delicately it was almost as if she’d done so by accident, as if he had asked her about the pile of unseen tiles seconds ago rather than many nights before. She
debated whether to risk it, but that fish salesman had also been calling things as he knocked (‘Fresh fish!’ she assumed, but would it really matter?). She waited, but whoever it was didn’t try a third time. She dumped the toys into the toy box and, with a sigh, decided the room was clean enough and all she really wanted was to get her beautiful boy off to bed after his weekly call with Henri and watch crappy Saturday evening telly by herself with a cup of tea and some sarcastic tweeting to her
George, I’m sure.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling the truth of it. ‘Tell me,’ she smiled, a smile so kind he felt as if he could live in it for the rest of his life. He opened his mouth to tell her about the crane in his backyard, a story he’d been shy of up until now, especially given Amanda’s sceptical reaction to it, but maybe now was the moment to tell her of the strange bird whose life he may have saved, whose origin he could never know, whose appearance had marked the beginning of this
deliver it to her. It would make her smile and, fool that he was, Hank’s heart would thump quite off rhythm when that happened. ‘They’ve moved in together,’ Hank said, re-corking the wine and shooing the same man out of the way of the fridge again. ‘Something like that.’ ‘Can’t you feel it, though?’ Mehmet said. ‘It feels like something’s coming.’ ‘I’m guessing for you it’s a hangover.’ ‘Please. I’m not even straight-girl drunk.’ ‘I genuinely haven’t the slightest idea what that means.’
and dropped in spectacular fashion by the tiny hands of Nadine, spreading them to every corner of the shop. George expected to be finding paperclips until his retirement. But these were just passing thoughts, floating idly by as he stared at what they’d given him. It was a crane, cut from a single piece of paper, just like the one he’d cut on that very first day, the one now stuck to the tile above his head. But that was impossible. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘Not impossible,’ Nadine
