The Uusimaa Chickadees No Longer Sing

In his debut novel, Franz Friedrich explores far-away islands, love, and the search for a way to live in our time.

On the island of Uusimaa, a documentary filmmaker is making her only nature film. In Berlin, in the hottest February on record, an American student discovers a mysterious choir group. In Brussels, a young documentary filmmaker leaves his wife and child. Franz Friedrich takes us to a lonely cabin in the woods, onto a Finnish icebreaker, and into a plane about to crash. And suddenly, after two decades of inexplicable muteness, the sparrows on the island of Uusimaa start to sing again. The contours of a future bleed through, and the rifts of our time become visible. This debut novel gently lays a new reality over our apparently inexorable present.