Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime—a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women. The Bird Artist is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

This is an amazing and beautifully written novel about two museum guards, one an eccentric uncle, the other his orphaned nephew, DeFoe. By day they spend their time curating an art collection, breaking the silence of the museum with heated conversation; by night we learn about their loves and past histories. DeFoe is in love with Imogen, the young caretaker of the sole small Jewish cemetery in Halifax Nova Scotia, where the novel begins in 1938. She becomes obssessed with a Dutch painting called Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam and abandons her life to look for nobility in the intensity of life in Amsterdam for Jews in the late 30s. The book is an examination of the desire to step out of the everyday and into action, with a startling conclusion. With echoes of the holocaust and of a world lost but not forgotten, this is a poignant and perfect novel of great power.

From the bestselling author of The Bird Artist, comes the final book in his Canadian trilogy (with The Bird Artist and The Museum Guard): a novel about spirit photographs, adultery, and murder It is 1927. Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Across Canada, Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur—theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence. When Peter arrives on the night of his employer’s wedding, his life changes in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Falling under the spell of Vienna’s brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie, the uneasy ménage à trois moves to Peter’s native Halifax, where he reluctantly comes to share Kala’s obsession with spirit photographs as Vienna’s violent art reaches a terrifying climax.