Part family history, part naturalist's journal-and her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years- Bird Cloud is Annie Proulx's vivid chronicle of building a house on a spectacularly beautiful piece of land in Wyoming. Idiosyncratic, original, and spectacularly vivid, Bird Cloud was conceived as a book about building a house and then became a family history, an archaeology of the Wyoming landscape, and as close to memoir as Annie Proulx will ever get. A half dozen years ago, Proulx fell in love with 600 acres being sold by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming. Grazing land plunged down a 400-foot cliff to the North Platte River. The property was home to bald eagles, mountain lions, and cranes. Interspersed with tales of construction and the stunning wildlife at Bird Cloud is family history going back to a great-great grandfather who was a river boat captain in the west in the mid-nineteenth century-a kindred spirit, it seems, who met Lafayette, Audubon, and Mark Twain. Bird Cloud will be an opportunity for reviewers and listeners to see what Annie Proulx is made of, where she comes from, how her magnificent mind works, and why she writes so brilliantly.