“I learned a lot about grief, and I learned a lot about what to let go of and how we hang on.” “I came at it from the point of view of learning a lot about life that I didn’t really want to learn,” she says. When Sarah returned to work on her novel, she found that not only had her sense of the novel changed, her sense of herself had changed as well. I’d put this book on hold while caring for my mom and going through that grieving process.” And then 10 days before my mom passed away, my sister died.

“I started the book, and then my mom had a catastrophic brain injury,” she says. Just as several characters in Other Birds must confront tragedy and grief, Sarah has had to do the same in her own life. When I ask her if this is true, she doesn’t hesitate. While Other Birds is certainly as magical as Sarah’s previous novels, it seems much more personal.

Since then, Sarah has published five novels that have gone on to sell millions of copies. The novel was an instant New York Times bestseller. All of Sarah’s previous novels contain magical elements, beginning with her 2007 debut novel, Garden Spells, which tells the story of the Waverley family, whose garden bears prophetic fruit and edible flowers with special powers. It’s also because my head is still buzzing with the possibility of magic after finishing Other Birds. If the setting sounds magical it’s because it is. In the distance, the city of Asheville sits like a pink jewel among the swells of misty blue mountains. While tourists and bellhops bustle all around us - the din of voices and laughter carrying along the great lobby’s stone floors - Sarah and I make our way to the verandah that overlooks the golf course. On a Saturday morning in mid-June, I meet Allen in the lobby of Asheville’s historic Grove Park Inn. While navigating the past and present of these myriad lives, Zoey reclaims her own life, and she learns that family is something you can create when you need it most. Spirits hover on the margins of people’s lives just like the tiny turquoise birds that have overtaken the Dellawisp’s courtyard. Not only is the Dellawisp haunted by the lives of the people who currently live there, it’s also haunted by the lives of the people who lived there once upon a time, for the living are not alone in the old, rambling complex. Although Zoey is heartbroken to learn that virtually nothing of her mother remains in the condo, she is pleased to make a home among the Dellawisp’s eccentric tenants. Upon her arrival, Zoey finds a historic building that houses a collection of mysterious misfits, all of them bearing their own personal stories driven by pain and longing. In Sarah Addison Allen’s new novel, Other Birds, an 18-year-old woman named Zoey Hennessey returns to her long-dead mother’s condominium on fictional Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina to reconnect with her mother’s spirit by tapping into the spirit of the place.

Dellawisps