Bird Suit

A tourist town folk tale of stifled ambition, love, loss, and the bird women who live beneath the lake.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don’t see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don’t want Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years on, the peaches are ripening again, the tourists have returned, and Georgia is looking for trouble with any ill-tempered man she can find. When that man turns out to be Arlo Bloom—her mother’s old friend and the new priest in town—she finds herself drawn into a complicated matrix of friendship, grief, faith, sex, and love with Arlo, his wife, Felicity, and their son, Isaiah. Vivid, uncanny, and as likely cursed as touched by grace, their story is a brutal, generous tale as sticky and lush as a Port Peter peach.

Sydney Hegele (they/them) is a queer Anglo-Catholic writer from the Greenbelt in Southern Ontario. They are the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), which was the winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays have appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, EVENT, The Poetry Foundation and Psychology Today. Their essay collection Bad Kids is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025. Sydney’s work often explores small-town queerness, environmental justice, mental illness, religious life, and the complicated relationships between these things. They live with their husband and French Bulldog on Treaty 13 Land (Toronto, Canada).

Praise for Bird Suit

“Mythological creatures and strange relationships shape this beguiling debut novel [which] takes flight thanks to the beauty of its prose.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Hegele] has created a fictional world that is at once intimate and mythic …the sheer scope—and interconnectedness—of which is staggering… Bird Suit is a big book in a small package, a novel of ideas steeped in sex and death, with bold questions of faith, self-knowledge and the nature of reality rooted in the image of sirens rising from the deep, singing their songs of destruction and rebirth.”—Toronto Star

“A queer take on the the genre of southern Ontario gothic literature…[which] tends to examine the secrets, gossip and hypocrisies of white Christian settler communities, sometimes invoking supernatural elements to illustrate the effects of stifling unwanted emotions and desires and suffering under repressive social norms…. Hegele has crafted a tense, provoking novel [that’s] filled with deeply observed, profoundly flawed characters, and compels to the very end.”—H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra

“At the center of Bird Suit is a seemingly-idyllic tourist town, with plenty of scenic options for residents [as well as] a secret community … [It] makes for a memorable juxtaposition of the folkloric and the quotidian.”—Reactor (formerly Tor.com)

“[Hegele’s characters] are broken in every humanly way [yet] written about without sensationalizing them or downplaying them. Bird Suit is a book you will joyfully return to like a complex childhood experience that you desperately want to make sense of and know you can only grow from meditating on.”—Canthius

“Gorgeously strange, marvelously written, bursting with peril, howling with life, Bird Suit is a splendid novel, the kind you don’t want to end, the kind that follows you (listen for the flapping) around.”—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie and In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“Bird Suit is soft and perfumed as a peach, with a hard, brutal, and wildly strange pit at the centre. This is a special novel, in the sense that it feels like something biological and rare, found in a mossy forest, but it is of our world, however skewed it may seem, because it investigates the difficult, true things of life. Love, sex, friendship, hatred, cruelty, violence, faith. Sydney Hegele’s writing is a delight to read, and their characters are compelling and absorbing. You will love them, cry for them, and shake your fist at them. Bird Suit marks the arrival of an original, brilliant new voice.”—Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest