The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

George Duncan is a good and kind man, the kind of man that is left by women because there is no challenge in him.  He is not brutal or unkind, just decent, growing old alone in quiet desperation and loneliness.  He has a grown up daughter Amanda who is deeply unhappy, somehow unable to connect with people around her and make friends.  George manages a printing shop and folds paper into the shapes of animals and flowers while his assistant Mehmet taunts the customers with terrible service.

It is an uneventful life until one night George hears a soulful cry from his garden.  Bumping and tripping his way through and out of his cavernous house he finds a crane with a terrible wound, an arrow right through one of its great wings.  He manages to break the arrow and although bleeding the great bird flies away.  The next day Kumiko appears in his shop and moves into his life.  She makes scenes which incorporate George's figures, paper sculptures that bring the art world to a frenzy and anyone who sees them to tears.  But Kumiko's most beautiful works are a set that she shows only to George, describing the Japanese myth of the Crane Wife, a sad and lonely tale of love, passion and loss.

Ness weaves the Crane Wife myth, Kumiko's mysterious appearance and George's lonely life together beautifully, we are never sure who or what Kumiko is and how the myth and what George experiences mesh together.  I don't usually like stories that do not have a resolution, but this was a stunning exception.

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