Love is the central force in Birdie, a collection of sixteen historical and out-of-time flash fictions that sing with the voices of women loving and losing and learning. The characters here find strength, despite the sorrows of death and deceit: a ghost-child returns to Massachusetts to comfort her grieving mother; the daughter of a Spanish orange tycoon regrets her mother's terrible choices; an English maid longs for, but can't be with, her mistress's son. Birdie contains Nuala O'Connor's signature ekphrastic work, drawing on artists as diverse as Matisse, da Vinci, and American painter...