AND YOUR BYRD CAN SING

“I’ve killed three men, but I’m not a murderer.” From the moment Billy Wayne Bastrop utters those words, readers are pulled into a story that refuses easy answers. Born in rural East Texas and raised by his formidable Aunt Sunshine—a chain-smoking, serpent-handling Pentecostal—Billy grows up in a world thick with contradictions. Religion and superstition, loyalty and betrayal, violence and tenderness all collide in a landscape where every road seems to lead back to guilt and blood.

Marked by the loss of his arm in childhood and the absence of the father who abandoned him, Billy carries an acute sense of otherness. His adolescence unfolds in a town where the church and the courthouse wield equal power, where family histories are as heavy as the humid air, and where belonging comes at a cost. Haunted by memories that cling like ghosts and mistakes that shape his future, Billy flees in search of escape—but discovers that no distance can keep the past from following.

In the tradition of Southern Gothic, And Your Byrd Can Sing is a novel of extremes: fierce love and corrosive hate, dark humor and profound sorrow, cruelty and grace. Jim Roberts crafts characters who are as unforgettable as the East Texas piney woods themselves—flawed, raw, and utterly human. Beneath the grit and violence lies a yearning for connection, for truth, and for some form of redemption that might balance the scales of a life marked by loss.

Readers will leave the book not only gripped by Billy’s journey but also stirred to reflect on their own: on the stories families tell and the ones they hide, on how faith can both save and wound, and on the ways we carry our burdens into the lives we create. At once brutal and redemptive, And Your Byrd Can Sing offers an unforgettable meditation on the blood we inherit, the truths we claim, and the fragile hope that redemption is never entirely out of reach.