Coming across a bit of art in the storyline of a novel is always a bonus. It can be a piece of art, an artist, or a spy whose resume includes expert painting restoration as in Daniel Silva‘s Gabriel Allon series. A Georgia O’Keefe painting provides the motivation for the characters in the fun mystery, A Dangerous Talent, by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins,  while the clues that lead to the perpetrator in Louise Penny‘s Still Life are hidden in a painting. The triptych in Tracy Guzeman‘s debut novel, The Gravity of Birds, holds the key to the lives and relationships of her characters.

The Gravity of Birds opens with a 1963 Mary Oliver poem, No Voyage, beginning with the line,
“I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.”
The book, too, begins in 1963, but focuses on present day as the search begins for the two pieces that will complete the triptych painted over forty years earlier, when the painter and the subjects, sisters on summer holiday, were young. An introductory synopsis can be read on the author’s website, along with reviews, including these words from Natalie Villacorta writing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “. . . Much like the paintings that the book describes, it is the details that hold our attention: the secrets we learn about the characters that make us care about them…It is only at the end, when the puzzle is completed, that we see all the pieces Guzeman so cleverly layered into the story.”

And, of course, when the puzzle is complete, we can almost visualize the three paintings side by side.