I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

**“Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both.” —Helen Oyeyemi, NPR**

This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award–nominated author of *The Bird Artist* begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy’s summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. Howard Norman’s life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds.

Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this “unexpectedly arresting” memoir, life’s unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (*The New York Times Book Review*).

“Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice. . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.” —*The Washington Post*

“These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he’s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.” —*The New Yorker*