The Birdcage Maker

About this book

Zerqa lives on its own postcard now: the blue doors, the white walls, the cliff and the sea, and the coach parties who buy, in the lane below the old workshop, machine made birdcages shipped in by the container, bright and cheap and gone at the next customs check. Youssef Mansour, thirty nine, makes perhaps twenty cages a year, each one drawn first in the Book, each one built for a particular household and a particular window, and each one, increasingly, unsold, because the town that made his family for two hundred years now walks past his door to buy the imports. When the museum in the capital offers a sum for the Book of Cages that would clear his debts for a decade, everyone in Zerqa tells him to take it. The Book is worth more than the workshop. The Book is worth more than the craft. Sell the Book, they say, and rest.