The Bird Hotel is a charming, atmospheric, sweeping novel spanning four decades in which journalist and

author Joyce Maynard imagines a glorious landscape where one broken woman, filled with grief and

haunted by secrets from her childhood, loses herself to find a place to belong, understand her past, and

learn how to live again in the present.

After a traffic accident in San Francisco takes the lives of her husband and son, Irene, dazed with grief, boards a bus destined for a small Central American village and finds refuge at La Llorona, a small, decaying hotel located on the shores of beautiful Peace Lake.

The beauty of the hotel’s gardens and the color and song of the birds surrounding La Llorona become a

sheltering and nourishing sensory background that helps Irene feel she is coming back to life and provides the inspiration that moves her to rediscover her love of art, which becomes both meditative and healing.

Forming a friendship with Leila, the owner of the hotel, Irene regains a sense of identity after her

devastating loss, and over the years her life swells as she bonds with hotel guests and forms friendships

with the villagers.

Irene’s days at La Llorona are beautiful and evocative, but when Leila unexpectantly dies and Irene is willed

the hotel, betrayal, deception, and drama come to the surface, and Irene’s life thereafter unfolds in ways

she could never have imagined.

With a mystery at its core and defined by themes of resilience and a way back from loss, The Bird Hotel is

a radiant novel - an emotionally rich journey of belonging, how healing begins when we open

ourselves to love, community, and the courage to start again.

The Bird Hotel is heartfelt and beautifully written and has all the hallmarks of a Joyce Maynard novel that have made her a leading voice of her generation.