Copyright




“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” excerpt copyright © 1931, 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage, from Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings, Introduction and Commentary by Richard S. Kennedy. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BIRD IN HAND. Copyright © 2009 by Christina Baker Kline. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

branch illustration from iStockPhoto

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kline, Christina Baker, 1964–

Bird in hand: a novel / Christina Baker Kline.—1st ed.

p. cm

ISBN 978-0-688-17724-9

1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title

PS3561.L478B57 2009

813'.54—dc22

2008049966

EPub Edition 2009 ISBN 9780061989803

Version 06102014

09 10 11 12 13

ISBN 978-0-06-182963-5 (international edition)