Connected via the fictional town of St Anne's, a community along Nova Scotia's western shore, each story takes its title from the children's rhyme Counting Crows:
One for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a message, four for a boy,
five for silver, six for gold,
seven for a secret never to be told.
Within each tale an individual (often from the same family, always from the same town) will note the number of crows in their midst and recall the poem as it relates to the prophecy and the story at hand. Between the last century and the current one, the characters (for the most part, women) walk a shifting landscape carved out by war, poverty, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath the gaze of a small town and these intelligent birds whose memories are unforgiving, we are as close as a heartbeat to the souls upon these pages.

M.V. Feehan's profile page

Born in Nova Scotia, M.V.Feehan has lived, studied and worked in many cities and towns throughout Canada, the United States and Ireland including Inverness, Montreal, Edmonton, Vancouver Island, Boston, Providence, and Dublin. She spent years as a reader and editor for the Vancouver literary journal Room, and was a member and reader for the Providence Writer's Circle Annual Publication. Her work has appeared in Canadian, American and European journals and in the anthology Echoes of Elizabeth Bishop. In past years she has received the Budge Wilson Award, The Hedy Zimra Scholarship and the E. Bishop Centenarian Fiction Award. She completed her MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in May 2021 and received the Individual Arts Grant from NSArts in 2022. This year she also received a place in the Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program to complete her first collection of short stories In the Shadow of Crows. Verna. currently resides on Cape Breton Island with her husband and son.

"M.V. Feehan's In the Shadow of Crows is a book of immense tenderness, grace, and emotional acuity. I admire Feehan's subtle attention to states of yearning and loss, and to the secrets we reveal and conceal?from ourselves, and from each other. She deftly maps the ways we navigate our internal worlds in the face of uncertainty, anxiety, shame, fear, hope, and love. Which is to say, as she writes, 'that jumble of history we carry. The world only we know because of the steps in our wake.'"?Jared Bland, editor and former publisher, McClelland & Stewart

"Poetic in its telling?M.V. Feehan's stories weave through time with recurring characters in the varied moments of a life. These people who live in or are connected to the town of St. Anne's experience hope and disappointment, small dreams and painful realities. Throughout the narrations a Greek chorus of crows foretell the fates that await the men and women whose lives are forever changing?. From a high school crush to the tragedy of a miscarriage to family ostracization, Feehan's characters endure the burden of being alive, but they also live lives shot through with the joy of friendship, unexpected bureaucratic kindness and acts of tenderness." Frank Macdonald, author of A Forest for Callum and Smeltdog Man

"A poignant view of lives passing with crows from a children's rhyme poised at the margins of each story. Feehan has a deep and sensitive understanding of human nature and a relentless focus on each individual working his and her way through the maze." Phyllis Barber, author of The Desert Between Us and The Desert Above

"Feehan successfully evokes nostalgia but more profoundly finds poignancy in each symbolic line, which is mirrored in the precision of her writing. The result is a mosaic that is at once dreamlike and realist. The struggles and moments of joy feel epic despite her remarkable concision." Chris Benjamin, author of Boy with a Problem