As a young man, Gigi Paulo arrives in New York and is immediately drawn to a girl he sees in a bar near Penn Station. Before he can approach her, she is gone. He returns to the bar for weeks in hopes of seeing her again, dreams of her at night, and searches the crowds for her face. Quiet and careful, he is not the type to become obsessed by a stranger. But obsessed he is.

Two years later he meets her at a party. Her name is Corrine. She seems to like his cooking and the blues albums he collects, but she never stays with him for long. As he discovers the secrets and violence of her life, Gigi finds himself unable to rescue her and barely able to save himself. He flees New York, but his obsession with Corrine follows him, even when he returns to his home in northern Minnesota, where he marries, has a daughter, and fishes the deep, quiet lakes he knows so well.

After he dies, his daughter uncovers her father’s desire for this unknown woman, leaving her to question the inherent perils of his life as well as her own.

Dark and poetic, Do Not Find Me moves between the voices of Gigi Paulo and his daughter with a compelling grace, its haunting undercurrents remaining long after the story has ended.

On the very edge of nowhere, prospectors long ago found iron ore and mined it, and workers traveled from all over the world to settle and make their homes there. It is against this historical backdrop that the people live out their desires and unfinished stories in the early summer of 1960.

Betty Larsen, raising her lover’s daughter on her own, waits impatiently for him to return. Skinny old Gertrude, who rounds the block headlong a dozen times a day, hears the bugs beneath the cut grass and the hysteria of a new season happening. And on the next block, Nicky Marodi, just returned from a state hospital for the mentally ill, lurches along in his new freedom. It is the first day of summer vacation, and the trees have blossomed in the brightest green.

Meanwhile, three neighborhood girls band together to explore an abandoned house, where they find mysteries in every room: half-packed boxes, what looks like blood, and the mementos of lives they try to imagine. But theirs is not the only mystery.

In fact, mysteries and secrets abound. Betty’s lover does not return. Gertrude suddenly experiences a longing she has never known. The girls encounter glints of magic that change each of them unexpectedly, even as a band of marauding teenage hoodlums invade their block and as Nicky lands in jail and the old Italians tend their gardens, claiming the land as their own.

A poetic and luscious paean of a particular place and time, Rare Birds interweaves the stories of these odd and dear characters, who could not have guessed they would be so well remembered.

The elusive lover of Do Not Find Me returns to tell her side of the story in The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard.

From her hapless childhood under Nazi occupation to her life as a woman of letters in present-day New York City, Corrine remains scrappy and wise. As a schoolgirl in Paris, she goes her own way, disinterested in most friendships, intensely drawn to the heroines she finds in literature and daring in the favors she is willing to trade with boys. When she is seventeen, she travels to America to visit her godmother and meets Charles Bernard, whose wealth and ruthlessness will alter the entire course of her life.

In a bold and mesmerizing voice, Corrine details her intense pull toward Charles, her lifelong attraction to the blue-eyed Italian named Gigi Paulo, and her observations of Paris, New York, St. John’s, and London as she roams in exile for decades of her life. Dear Reader, she begins, I have my tales to tell. And so she does in this dark and compelling novel.

Corrine will surprise you, confide in you, and ultimately win you, despite her ferocious and singular ways. The severed heart beats wildly beneath the floor boards. Do you hear it, she asks. By the end of her story, you will, dear reader, you will.