The Way the Crow Flies

The Way the Crow Flies is a novel by the Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald, published by Knopf Canada in 2003. It is her second novel.

The story is set mainly at the Royal Canadian Air Force Station Centralia, a small town in southern Ontario, in the early 1960s, and it is told largely through Madeleine McCarthy, whose father is a wing commander at the base. Madeleine and her sister settle into a neighbourhood, a school and a life organised around the airfield, and the adult world around them is consumed by the Cold War and by the disappearance of a local child. MacDonald built the book around the real case of a Canadian boy whose death led to the murder trial of Steven Truscott, and the novel follows the family and the community through that investigation and then years afterwards, when Madeleine is an adult and the way the case was handled has become part of who she is. The air force setting is drawn in detail, with the procedures of the base and the routines of a military family.

MacDonald had written the novel Fall on Your Knees before this one and has also worked as an actor and playwright, and this novel uses the crime and its aftermath to look at a particular kind of Canadian childhood.