The Crane Wife: Patrick Ness

This was an interesting mythical type writing. A man, who is a likeable but boring fella, is everyone's friend, but no ones love. His daughter doesn't even call him dad, but distances herself from him by calling him "George". One day George hears keening in his yard and finds a Japanese Crane...in England. The crane is hurt, an arrow has been shot through her wing(which is part of the myth) George removes and arrow and the bird takes off. The next day in his shop, a woman, Kukumo comes in and George falls in love with her and finds meaning in his life through her. She takes his paper cuttings and makes tiles for him, which makes him rich and famous. He goes to her home uninvited and sees she is a crane and makes the master pieces using feathers, which she plucks from herself. That nice the house mysteriously burns down and even though George knows the crane caught him when he jumped out of the house, the woman's body is found in the remains of the fire. The story that is interwoven with the novel is the story of the creation of the earth, the crane, which was the daughter of the sky, falls in love with the volcano, which creates and destroys the world at it's whim. The two both love and hate each other equally. As the crane flies off to leave the volcano, he shoots her- which becomes the beginning of the novel where the crane enters George's life with an arrow in her wing. The story then ends as the volcano and crane meet up again showing that stories start way before we see them begin and never end.