In The Snow Geese, a model of artful, elegant prose, William Fiennes, a young convalescent, follows migrating snow geese on their annual 3,000 mile journey to the Arctic Circle. Fiennes"s own journey, a wide loop he hopes will return him to his pre-illness life, is no less arduous. Fiennes travels to south Texas, and leapfrogs the birds--by car, bus, train, snowmobile, and foot--en route to their nesting grounds on Baffin Island. His journey"s log is freckled with pungent lessons on avian orientation, the Northern Lights, and the sport of curling as well as portraits of birdwatchers, former hobos, backyard inventors, and Inuit hunters. Most moving are his meditations on restlessness--the primal, contradictory human impulses to leave and return and leave and return. Its prose crystalline and illuminating, its double-helix narrative intricate, The Snow Geese is a rare and painfully lovely work. --H. O"Billovitch