I just want to start this review by saying that this cover does its contents no justice. It is not that I dislike the cover, but I feel it doesn't match the poignancy of the book too well. But, hey, the lesson here is to never judge a book by it's cover, kids! 
 I read one paragraph of this book and I instantly knew I was falling in love. Having previously only read Ness' YA fiction, I was intrigued as to how his adult fiction would translate. I am so pleased to say that it had the same delicacy and poignancy incorporated in the writing. The opening paragraph sums up Ness' writing entirely and beautifully - vividly piquant, heart-achingly descriptive and quietly witty. His writing continually shocks and enlightens me as he constantly pushes the boundaries of the reader's expectations, whether that's from something as simple as sudden humour or something as dark as a sudden plunge into death and despair. Here, it was the former, but that did not mean it set the tone for the entire book. There was plenty of the latter thrown into the mix too, in true Ness style. 
 The Crane Wife is the story of George Duncan, who is the epitome of the average man. That is until he is awoken at night by the distinctly unaverage occurrence of a crane crash-landing in his back garden, after being hit through the wing by an arrow. This mix of the fantastical and the ordinary is where the power of the book lay. It is a book full of ordinary, everyday people, the ones unlikely to have a story written about them at all. But here they are. And here it is. 
 It is sometimes a little arduous to dissect the truth of the story in amongst the overlying sub-plots and side-story. But, to quote Ness himself, "there were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life . A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew ." And I wholeheartedly agree.