In the distance, the city of Asheville sits like a pink jewel among the swells of misty blue mountains. While tourists and bellhops bustle all around us - the din of voices and laughter carrying along the great lobby’s stone floors - Sarah and I make our way to the verandah that overlooks the golf course. On a Saturday morning in mid-June, I meet Allen in the lobby of Asheville’s historic Grove Park Inn. While navigating the past and present of these myriad lives, Zoey reclaims her own life, and she learns that family is something you can create when you need it most. Spirits hover on the margins of people’s lives just like the tiny turquoise birds that have overtaken the Dellawisp’s courtyard. Not only is the Dellawisp haunted by the lives of the people who currently live there, it’s also haunted by the lives of the people who lived there once upon a time, for the living are not alone in the old, rambling complex. Although Zoey is heartbroken to learn that virtually nothing of her mother remains in the condo, she is pleased to make a home among the Dellawisp’s eccentric tenants. Upon her arrival, Zoey finds a historic building that houses a collection of mysterious misfits, all of them bearing their own personal stories driven by pain and longing. In Sarah Addison Allen’s new novel, Other Birds, an 18-year-old woman named Zoey Hennessey returns to her long-dead mother’s condominium on fictional Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina to reconnect with her mother’s spirit by tapping into the spirit of the place.
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