The Paper Birds: A Novel

Imagine you have only a pencil and paper, and your puzzle-solving skills to help end the war

Gemma Sullivan lands a coveted office job in the summer of 1943, only to discover that she’s been hired to work in a top-secret codebreaking office in an unsuspecting house along the lake in Mimico, Ontario.

The ‘Cottage’ – run by the brilliant, eccentric Miss Fearing, who was trained at England’s Bletchley Park – pulls Gemma in with its urgent lure and mystery. But along with this job comes a lifelong oath of secrecy.

Gem can’t tell anyone what she does for work, not even her elderly Aunt Wren, who has raised her since the age of three after the tragic death of her parents. Her aunt harbors of a deep love of crosswords and Tarot cards and an equally passionate hatred for war since the death of her own fiancée in WWI. The last thing she'd want for her niece is a job that involves anything to do with the war.

The codebreaking is intense, mind-numbing, at times, but as Gem is pulled deeper into wartime intelligence work, she becomes an integral part of the codebreakers’ circle. The Cottage codebreaking unit is small but determined, but in order to be successful, they must learn to work together. But when Gem begins fraternizing with a handsome prisoner at a POW camp nearby - who later disappears - she risks losing everything.

The Paper Birds is a WWII love story that reveals the struggles and sacrifices of every day working women during the war and highlights the previously unknown codebreaking work undertaken by women in Canada during the war.

© 2025 HarperCollins Publishers (Lydbog): 9781443472838

Release date

Lydbog: 10. juni 2025