A woman of the Swedish aristocracy loses her young husband in the Russian revolution and finds her way to northern Ontario to work as a nurse for the Dionne Quintuplets before discovering a deep love of the birds that live on her handful of acres. She creates longitudinal behavior and population studies that are still used by Ornithologists today.

Merilyn Simonds is the author of 20 books, including the nonfiction classic The Convict Lover, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, and most recently, the novel Refuge. The founding artistic director of Kingston WritersFest, Simonds is an influential champion of writers and writing. She lives with writer and translator Wayne Grady and divides her time between Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.