The Paper Birds

A Novel

By: Jeanette Lynes

Narrated by: Denice Stradling

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.

Story is very good.

I had a hard time listening to the reader. She sounds like she’s a robot. Enunciating every word so it doesn’t flow as a person would speak.

A Masterful Literary Monet

I have every book this wonderful author has published (7 books of poems and 4 novels, that include this last one). And with every new release, she reminds me why I love her form of expression so deeply. Like an impressionistic painter, she creates wistful imagery…where life meets artistic expression. Her insightful words are like the broad brush strokes that leap from the impressionist’s canvas and whose light and colour leave the audience with a range of emotions found at the depth of one’s soul: hope, empathy, defeat, triumph, beauty, love in its purest forms, nobility, wonder. The historical relevance of “The Paper Birds” is also a delight as the reader learns much about Canada’s role in “behind the scenes” efforts that were paramount to WWII’s allied success. Ms. Lynes’ research was admirably tireless, and the exquisite eloquence with which she shares factual nuggets from this era - while weaving together a heart-filled narrative about characters that truly resonate - makes each chapter as delicious as petite-fours served at The Savoy’s elegant high tea when surrounded by the very views that inspired Monet himself. Like all of Jeanette Lynes’ previous novels, I know this one will have a profound and long-lasting effect on my heart.