';Vividly drawn characters, history, music, birds, love, loneliness, and wisdom… A brilliant book, rich and satisfying as a Viennese torte' (Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology). In this poignant yet rollicking novel, ninety-six-year-old ornithologist Luka Levadski forgoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Marthathe last of the now-extinct passenger pigeonsdied. Levadski too has an acute sense of being the last of a species. He may have devoted much of his existence to studying birds, but now he befriends a hotel butler and another elderly guest, who also doesn't have much time left, to share in the lively escapades of his final days. This gloriously written tale is ';a book like a fantastic party, as unshakeable as a child's faith [that] astonishes to the very end' (Neue Zurcher Zeitung).
