Inspired by one of the most bizarre true-crime stories in recent memory—the theft of hundreds of rare bird skins from the British Museum of Natural History in 2009—Stealing Paradise is a thriller and an intimate drama, told from the perspective of the thief himself, Edwin Rist, an American virtuoso flautist and fly-tier. In this spellbinding allegory of colonial reckoning, Edwin is introduced by a classmate to new forms of beauty: not the iridescent feather of an endangered bird or a flawlessly played phrase in a piece of classical music, but the kind of splendors that cannot be possessed or perfected.