The Impossible Bird

Patrick O'Leary

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There is a place—a world—where famine and poverty do not exist. Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind. Is it Heaven? As two brothers are about to discover, it's more like Hell. Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there's-no-success-like-excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned-down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war—an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten. But all that is about to change. One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun-wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is "the code." The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren't sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are simple: find your brother or die. But what begins as a cross-country manhunt—brother converging on brother—turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected. Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need? For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of the impossible bird.