ABOUT
THE BOOK

Finus Bates has loved chatty, elegant Birdie Wells ever since he saw her cartwheel naked through the woods near the backwater town of Mercury, Mississippi, in 1917. Having ‘caught hold of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness’ and never let go, he’s loved her for some eighty years: through their marriages to other people; through the mysterious early death of Birdie’s womanising husband, Earl; and through all the poisonous accusations against Birdie by Earl’s no-good relatives.