The Crane follows the difficult choices confronting someone who cannot go on being lied to and explores how they carry on in the face of hardship. 

It’s 1968 and James Anderson’s twin brother Dave has just been killed in the Vietnam war. Knowing his turn is next, James turns his back on his family’s military legacy, evading the draft and travelling to Newfoundland to fulfill a promise his brother made to a fellow soldier. Unwittingly swept into an intergenerational family secret while on assignment for a St. John’s newspaper, James finds something in Newfoundland that could just save his life. 

Advance praise for The Crane:

"An intimate unfolding of grief, that explores the ties that bind us, break us, and reform us new. Monica Kidd’s, The Crane, will carry you from Wyoming to Vietnam to the tightly knit community of Job’s Cove on Newfoundland’s coast. A place where the land is as present as its history, and even the deepest fractures can begin to heal. An extraordinary story of the past that boldly defies our current moment. "
Shelly Kawaja
author of The Raw Light of the Morning

"Monica Kidd's third novel brings forth an 'authentic' Newfoundland from the perspective of James, a CFA (Wyoming) on a tragic quest to the Island to honour his dead brother. Kidd teases Atlantic tropes without engaging in the self-ironizing parody that is too common from writers of the Atlantic region, writing in a clear and spare style that retains her poetic skills of description and image. Part romance and part bildungsroman, the novel manages somehow to read as a provisional Newfoundland, its beautiful scenes of town and outport - read her passage on clearing out roots and agree! - essential to the plot. Kidd's not only looking to make you laugh or cry, she's imagining into being a collective mourning for another time as brought to life by flesh and blood characters, all while somehow avoiding nostalgia."
Shane Neilson