The Birdcage: The spellbinding new mystery from the author of Sunday Times bestseller and Richard and Judy pick The Glass House

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The Birdcage focuses on three estranged half-sisters, Flora, Kat and Lauren. They are all the daughters of Charlie Finch, a still life painter. His only famous painting was called Girls and the Birdcage, which depicted his daughters sitting on a couch next to a birdcage. It was painted in 1999, the year of the eclipse. One day, Armand's son Val, who is a product of Armand's drunken one-night stand with a woman named Katharine, comes home to announce that he has been seeing a young woman named Barbara whom he intends to marry. Although unhappy about the news, Armand agrees to support Val. Unfortunately, Barbara's parents are the ultra-conservative Republican Senator Kevin Keeley and his wife Louise. The complex dynamics that fuel sisterly love but ignite rivalry set the emotional tone for British author Eve Chase’s irresistibly suspenseful drama, The Birdcage…Chase navigates the relationships Flora, Kat and Lauren have with each other and with their father with masterful strokes, offering enticing, layered glimpses into their early years…The eerie, ethereal imagery in The Birdcage [will] linger with readers long after they part ways with the Finch family.”— Shelf Awareness It was Felix who named it The Birdcage, the tall house in Bristol where Miss Pidgeon lived with her tenant, the beautiful and talented actress Angel, and Angel's daughter, Lizzie. It was Felix whom they all adored and who was so in love with Angel, but while Lizzie longed for a father, Felix had other commitments: to his insecure, possessive wife Marina and to their son Piers, both living at beautiful, mellow Michaelgarth, the family home on the edge of Exmoor. Many years later, when Lizzie comes at last to Michaelgarth and meets Piers for the first time, she finds a family in trouble.

If the history, served up in newspaper articles, is sometimes a little heavy-handed, both Julia and John Tredevant are satisfyingly complex. Julia combines intelligence, humour and a powerful maternal instinct, while despite his bullishly capitalist impulses, Tredevant is sensitive and needy. His desire for Lizzie to conform to a wifely compliance is driven at least as much by his fear of abandonment as by convention and the desire to control. Dunmore could not write an ugly sentence if she tried – she has a gift for taking the ordinary and rendering it new

The Birdcage somehow manages to be suspenseful while at the same time remaining sensitive toward and generous to its troubled, flawed characters…[It] turns its canny eye on how our all-too-human weaknesses can set off terrible consequences, and how love and compassion can heal and help us all become better people.”— Criminal Element beautiful description of nature + realistic portrayal of young baby puppy & the joy they bring. + theater & drama. + importance of balance and acceptance Because life's grown-up lesson-always, by its nature, learned too late- is about consequences, mostly the unforseen ones."

But for Lizzie the revolution has other consequences. Her husband, John Diner Tredevant, is a property developer who has borrowed heavily to construct a splendid terrace of houses set high into the steep hillside of Clifton, two hundred feet above the Avon. The location is a powerful metaphor: with France in turmoil, war looms and once-eager buyers are in retreat, reluctant to invest in uncertain times. As work on the houses slows and is finally abandoned, the futures of both the half-finished enterprise and its ambitious master-builder teeter on the brink of the abyss. Five generations of Hamiltons seek peace with their beloved home Michaelgarth near Exmoor England. The gentle understanding Grandfather provides support to his young grandson caught between his gregarious, fun loving father and his jealous, possessive, overly serious mother. When his father seeks warmth elsewhere with an actress, her young daughter and best friend, they form a family meeting each other’s needs. A chance meeting forces him to make a decision between this warm family snd his son. What happens when the Son and daughter meet up as adults? The book explores long term infidelity which meets unmet needs for warmth and acceptance as well as affairs based on a thirst for adventure and lust. It also looks at how jealousy, rigidity and possessiveness harm the spirit and lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. a b c d Peterson, Margie (October 13, 2017). "Nathan Lane on enduring impact of 'The Birdcage': 'People still talk to me about it' ". The Morning Call. Archived from the original on February 4, 2023 . Retrieved November 15, 2023. Bawer, Bruce (March 10, 1996). "FILM VIEW;Why Can't Hollywood Get Gay Life Right?". The New York Times . Retrieved November 8, 2023. Birdcage' No. 1 at weekend box office". The Oshkosh Northwestern. March 11, 1996. p.27. Archived from the original on May 19, 2023 . Retrieved May 19, 2023– via Newspapers.com.Despite the success of the evening, trouble begins when the senator's chauffeur betrays him to two tabloid journalists, Harry Radman and his photographer, who have been hoping for a scoop on the Coalition story and have followed the Keeleys to South Beach. While they research The Birdcage, they also remove a note that Armand has left on the door informing Katharine not to come upstairs. When she arrives, she unknowingly reveals the deceptions, leading Val to confess to the scheme and finally identify Albert as his true parent.

Fallon, Kevin (November 20, 2014). "Out of the Birdcage: How Mike Nichols Made Gay Culture Mainstream". The Daily Beast . Retrieved November 8, 2023.Almost a lifetime now, or as we hear Kat musing, “A different millennium, a time when everything was remarkably undocumented…”

Dutka, Elaine (March 17, 1997). " 'Fargo,' 'Sling Blade' Win Top Writers Guild Honors". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved November 7, 2023. Many years later, when Lizzie comes at last to Michaelgarth and meets Piers for the first time, she finds a family in trouble - and which, miraculously, needs her to help them to heal. Reunions can be a minefield for exposing dysfunctional family relationships. When Flora, Kat and Lauren gather at the Cornish coast for a visit with their ailing father, they face all the pitfalls of a reunion, in addition to remembering a traumatic event that took place on the evening of a summer eclipse when they were just girls.Maslin, Janet (March 8, 1996). "Film Review: The Birdcage". The New York Times . Retrieved July 2, 2020. It's worth dwelling a moment on that political espionage plot, because at a remove of over forty years it's easy to overlook what a timely, if not prescient, novel The Mask of Memory must have been. 1974 was a tumultuous year for Britain, with the introduction of the Three-Day Week followed by two general elections, so Canning's references to newspaper strikes and trade union unrest, and his scenario of a (presumably) Conservative PM seeking to undermine the unions, have more than a whiff of the then-zeitgeist about them. Where his own sympathies lay I wouldn't care to conjecture, but writing, I would guess, in 1973 he was clearly vexed by events unfolding around him, as evidenced by a monologue from Warboys late in the novel: Berardinelli, James (1996). "Birdcage, The (United States, 1996)". ReelViews . Retrieved July 2, 2020. In Birdcage Walk, Dunmore explores what is, for her, new territory, the febrile days of the French Revolution and the Terror that followed it. Her approach is characteristically oblique. Lizzie Fawkes is a young woman living not in Paris but in Bristol. She has been raised among radicals: her feisty mother, Julia, widowed when Lizzie was an infant, is a passionate advocate of women’s rights in the Mary Wollstonecraft mould, while her stepfather Augustus writes rousing republican pamphlets. Both follow closely the reported progress of events in Paris, Augustus with zealous enthusiasm, Julia with a rising sense of unease as the murderousness of the mob is unleashed. With threatening anonymous notes, winter storms, and stifled memories, this book kept me thoroughly invested throughout. I did guess the 'big' secret, but that didn't mar my enjoyment of the reveal one iota.