Gracie is a serious, sensitive, aspiring writer; Jannie, her autistic younger sister, is passionate about birds. As children, they were taken by their mother on a senseless trip through Europe that ended in their mother’s suicide. Now, in Berkeley, their father works tirelessly to find ways to engage Jannie, while Gracie—unwilling to reveal the truth about her mother’s suicide or her sister’s autism to anyone outside her family—weaves a web of lies around herself that isolate her even as Jannie, in part through her relationships with and understanding of birds, begins to speak, interact, and emerge.

Narrated by Gracie and alternating back and forth between 2002, when the sisters are still children/adolescents, and 2017, when they are in their early adulthood, The Language of Birds is a story of coming to understand what seems unfamiliar and indecipherable, and of finding authentic ways to be with the people you love.

“This novel contains passages so deep that they will literally take your breath away, and you will think: You must remember these words forever.”
—Jeffrey Masson, New York Times best-selling author of Dogs Never Lie About Love

“In the pages of Anita Barrows’s luminous and layered novel, we meet characters etched by pain and loss, trapped in ways that seem to defy understanding. Yet through the profound empathy of this writer, we are also granted an intimate window into the subtle art of saving and being saved. What a deeply human and hopeful story.”
—Elizabeth Rosner, award-winning and best-selling novelist, poet, essayist, and author of The Speed of Light and Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory