The Paper Birds: A Novel
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Imagine you have only a pencil, paper, and your puzzle-solving skills to help end the war
Gemma Sullivan lands a coveted office job in the summer of 1943, only to discover that she’s been hired to work in a top-secret codebreaking office in an unsuspecting house along the lake in Mimico, Ontario.
The ‘Cottage’ – run by the brilliant, eccentric Miss Fearing, who was trained at England’s Bletchley Park – pulls Gemma in with its urgent lure and mystery. But along with this job comes a lifelong oath of secrecy.
Gem can’t tell anyone what she does for work, not even her elderly Aunt Wren, who has raised her since the age of three after the tragic death of her parents. Her aunt harbours of a deep love of crosswords and Tarot cards and an equally passionate hatred for war since the death of her own fiancée in WWI. The last thing she'd want for her niece is a job that involves anything to do with the war.
The codebreaking is intense, mind-numbing, at times, but as Gem is pulled deeper into wartime intelligence work, she becomes an integral part of the codebreakers’ circle. The Cottage codebreaking unit is small but determined, but in order to be successful, they must learn to work together. But when Gem begins fraternizing with a handsome prisoner at a POW camp nearby - who later disappears - she risks losing everything.
The Paper Birds is a WWII love story that reveals the struggles and sacrifices of every day working women during the war and highlights the previously unknown codebreaking work undertaken by women in Canada during the war.
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JEANETTE LYNES is the author of the bestselling novel The Apothecary’s Garden, a finalist for a High Plains Book Award and two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her second novel, The Small Things That End the World, won the Fiction Prize at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her first novel, The Factory Voice, was longlisted for the Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. She has also written seven books of poetry. Her forthcoming non-fiction book Apron Apocalypse: Lyric Essays received the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award. A settler, Jeanette Lynes grew up on the traditional territory of the People of the Three Fires: the Ojibway, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations of Anishinabek peoples. Since 2011 she has directed the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis.
