The Bird Healer's Daughter
From the author of the bestselling novel, The Sister’s Tale
The Bird Healer’s Daughter is a richly imagined historical novel inspired by Canada’s first woman lawyer. Set during the final years of the Age of Sail, the novel follows a group of remarkable women as they fight for justice, equality, and a better future for women and children.
Ursa is a resourceful, unwed mother who sews men’s shirts to support herself and her daughter in a modest Saint John flat. Lucy is an idealistic young woman from nearby Pleasant Valley who dreams of becoming a lawyer and seeks independence by working in a cotton mill. When Lucy rescues Ursa’s elderly pug, their seemingly dissimilar lives become interwoven until one day Ursa is forced to make a decision that threatens tragic consequences for herself, her child, and the entirety of Lucy’s family.
Beth Powning returns to the Victorian landscape she so intricately built in The Sea Captain’s Wife, and The Sister’s Tale, ushering readers into a world of warmth, comfort, and possibility, but also fraught with imminent danger.
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Beth Powning lives in New Brunswick, Canada. She is the author of four novels and three books of literary non-fiction, as well as articles, essays, and blog posts. A full-time writer, she gives presentations, sings in a chorus, serves on boards and committees, makes baskets, and tends gardens. Her last novel, The Sister’s Tale, was an immediate Canadian bestseller, hitting #3 on both The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail bestsellers lists. It also won the 2022 New Brunswick Book Award for fiction, which called it “a meticulously rendered imagining of one household at a pivotal point in the province’s social and legal evolution. Balanced and precise, the prose ushers the reader into a bygone world that couldn’t feel more current or more urgent.”
