A man in a distant world races through his entire life, falling in love with a woman he only sees for one night every fifteen years. A captain of a clunker starship travels back and forth through time and space for a contract, so desperate to carve out her own future, she ends up leaving her past behind her. A brilliant engineer is caught between being in love and building a home for the human race, and regrets her decision for her entire life. A young boy appears suddenly from the sky, crashing to a strange planet from out of nowhere; he cannot speak, but expresses himself through music, his story found in the bittersweet song of a flute. While these threads all seem to tell a different story, trust me, they don’t. Debut novelist Simon Jimenez takes each of them, and weaves them together to build The Vanished Birds, an intricate, affecting, haunting, and beautiful science fiction story that spans time, space, and lives.
Reader, I cried.
