The Bird Hotel

Enter the magical world of La Llorona with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard.

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, makes a life in San Francisco in the eighties, where she marries a very good man named Lenny and gives birth to their son, Arlo. On the way to watch the World Series together, Arlo and Lenny are killed in a car accident. It's the day of the 1989 earthquake.

Irene considers jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but chooses instead to board a hippie bus called The Green Turtle, headed for parts unknown. She doesn't care where. She lands somewhere in Central America-in a small village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano. There she meets Leila, a longtime expat with a mysterious backstory of her own who takes her under her wing. The garden is filled with birds. Irene starts painting them. 

When, a month into her time at La Llorona, Leila drops dead in her garden, Irene learns that she has inherited the hotel. She makes a plan to fix the place up just enough to sell it. As the never-ending building projects multiply, Irene finds herself rediscovering her interest in life through the relationships she builds in the community and with her hotel guests, as well as her connection to the natural world around her-most particularly, the birds. Hers is a story of a lost and questing outsider in search of a landing place, a woman who finds what she is looking for far from home.

Like Maynard's most recent novel, Count the Ways (though utterly different in its setting and the world it portrays), The Bird Hotel is a big, sweeping story spanning four decades, offering an element of magical realism and lyricism as well as humor. While the world New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard brings to life on the page is rendered from her imagination, it's one informed by the more than twenty years she has spent a significant amount of her time in a small Mayan indigenous village in Guatemala.