"The crane wife" by Patrick Ness

An audio book.

Unassuming George, divorced, 48, finds a wounded crane in his garden. He pulls out the arrow and it flies away. A mysterious, wise-sounding woman, Kumiko, an artist, turns up at his workplace (he's a printer; he works with Mehmet). On their 2nd date they sleep together. She makes art from feathers with his help - 32 "tiles" illustrating a legend.

He has a daughter Amanda, who separated from her French partner before their son was born. She makes friends easily and loses them (May and Rachel) again through over-honesty.

A few tiles at a time we're told a tale of the crane wife - the woman and the volcano.

These 3 PoVs are interlaced. Amanda has a one-night stand with her ex, who she still loves. She sees a wounded crane in a park. She and Kumiko meet by chance. The artworks are attracting a cult following and sell for crazy prices. We learn that George had dated Rachel (Amanda's boss) despite the age gap. Rachel phones him. She's in a mess, and, she thinks, pregnant. His dreams become more mystical. He invites Rachel over and they sleep together, which seems unrealistic. The PoVs influence each other - the myth seems to cast a spell over the humans so that the myth becomes more real.

While Kumiko is sleeping in George's flat there'a a fire. We're given 5 explanations for it - arson by Rachel being an option. Amanda goes in to save them. George and Amanda think they're saved by Kumiko but she was already dead by then.

The analogies are sometimes detailed - "Pregnancy didn't just happen in your womb, your whole body reorganises itself like country house staff preparing for a visit from royalty". Free indirect speech provides the comedy.

Other reviews

• goodread (Linna: filled with endless descriptions dithering around for ages, talking about nothing with a hint of pretentiousness permeating every scene. And then when the themes and messages come in, they're communicated in a heavy-handed way.)
• Ursula K Le Guin (the passages where deep mythic chords are struck ring less true than the scenes having to do with ordinary London life. The merely human characters are vivid and likeable, the story is lively and often quite funny. Momentum slackens only in the long passages of unbroken, unascribed, brief-line dialogue. ... This essentially light, good-natured book tries to invoke powerful, elemental emotions using a vocabulary and imagery too trite to do the job. ... There is a good deal of such self-conscious striving for cool. Yet in other passages emotionality is pushed almost to the point of hysteria, while banal language reduces the beautiful central legend to sentimentality.)
• James Bradley (Ness has never been a writer to leave a metaphor implicit or an implication unsaid. Time and again, one feels him stepping in, speaking through his characters, as if anxious we might not understand ... for a novel that often strives for pure affect, a fair amount of it is surprisingly unaffecting. ... Amanda, whose self-defeating anger and despair are brilliantly and painfully rendered, [] is, in many ways, the most impressive thing about the novel. In contrast to George and Kumiko, Amanda always feels uncomfortably but powerfully alive)