ABOUT THE BOOK

When Kate Banner, an American midwife in Nicaragua, loses another patient - a young woman who had given birth only the night before on the bottom of a swamped wooden boat - she knows it is time to go home. Because to care for the children of war, you have to cut pieces of your heart. But traveling home leads her to Guatemala, where even children sometimes disappear.

Patricia Henley's 'Hummingbird House' is a beautifully told story of a woman's struggles to face new territories of love and war in the middle of her life. This is a moving and emotionally trustworthy tale of a human heart unbinding itself in the most unjust of worlds.

Patricia Henley spent five months traveling in Central America and southern Mexico while writing 'Hummingbird House'. She has published two collections of stories, 'Friday Night at Silver Star' and 'The Secret of Cartwheels'. Carnegie-Mellon University Press published a book of her poems, 'Back Roads', in 1996. Her stories have been anthologized in 'Best American Short Stories' and 'The Pushcart Prize Anthology'. 'Hummingbird House' is her first novel. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.