Hiding from the Russian army in a shelled-out house in southern Ukraine, Mike Lacondeguy comes across an old book of poems with a mystifying couplet: All the world went silent/Only the maidens and the nightingale stirred.

Half a year later, Mike returns to Virginia, and he’s called out by a homeless woman who argues with squirrels in public parks, dresses in her dead husband’s military fatigues and, if local legend can be believed, performs the occasional miracle. She pressures him to intervene in the lives of three new Americans connected by a disturbing secret … and the verse he discovered in the war.

CHICKEN TODAY, FEATHERS TOMORROW is a darkly humorous and ultimately uplifting fable of the quintessential American ritual of reinventing one’s self.