Bird of Paradox and Other Tales gathers vivid, true-to-life stories from John Devlin's years drifting between Ireland, London, China, and Vietnam. Classrooms, bars, backstreets, lakeside promenades, and long bus rides become stages where the ridiculous rubs shoulders with the tragic. The author teaches English abroad, falls in and out of love, and collects characters you could not invent: managers with whiskey noses, beggars on trolleys, songbird clubs at dawn, and a saxophonist whose music drifts across Luhu Lake. Some pieces will make you laugh, others will sting, and many sit in that murky in-between where life actually happens. Arranged as a loose journey from London to China and on to Vietnam with detours home to Ireland, the book reads like a box of ticket stubs and scribbled notes that finally grew into polished stories. It is creative non-fiction told with a journalist's eye and a traveler's appetite for chance encounters. Whether it is an online romance arranged between shifts, a lockdown walk to the supermarket, or a night out that turns into a minor epic, Devlin captures the texture of place and the voices of people you will not forget. For readers of travel writing, memoir, and literary essays who like their truth messy, human, and full of heart.
