You will laugh at a funeral (chapter one) and then discover, word by ridiculous word, what it costs and what it returns to learn your own family from the outside.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
Say Again
The last fluent speaker of her family's private language is a foul-tempered parrot who won't shut up.
Fen translates other people's voices for a living. Her own family left her a language she cannot understand.
The story
What waits inside
Fen makes speech legible. As a subtitler, she can hear hesitation, misdirection, and the meaning hidden between one word and the next.
After her grandmother dies, Fen inherits Bruno, a sixty-year-old African grey parrot, along with a legal obligation to bring him to family occasions. He is the last fluent speaker of the private language her family chose not to teach her, and nobody will explain his vocabulary.
Bruno is not delivering a message. He is repeating a lifetime.
With spectrograms, old tapes, and the reluctant help of relatives who prefer silence, Fen begins reconstructing a language shaped by migration, secrecy, and belonging. Each recovered phrase brings her closer to the family she thought excluded her, and to the choice her parents made when they decided belonging required silence.
A funny, tender literary novel about translation, inheritance, and the imperfect ways a family makes itself heard.
None — fully realist: one long-lived parrot (Bruno), three generations of one family's invented idiolect (endearments, kitchen commands, a dead uncle's laugh-phrase, curses rated by the grandmother's three tiers), and the granddaughter who was cut out of the language before memory.
Being locked out of a family language is a wound; picking the lock decades later, with an absurd accomplice and no living teacher, is a form of love that no one plans and everyone recognizes.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.