Young adult author Patrick Ness writes for an older audience in 'The Crane Wife'

As someone who was born into a military family, the author Patrick Ness moved around a lot as a child. In Hawaii, a Japanese teacher once told him the story of "The Crane Wife," a folk tale about a man who helps an injured bird.

The story fascinated him because it opens with an act of kindness, unlike so many folk tales that begin with a hurtful act.

"It's a fisherman who finds a crane with an arrow through its wing and he saves the crane, he saves the bird," Ness said. "And the bird flies away, and it becomes a fable about how a kind man can make bad decisions, which lead to tragic consequences. And that to me had a really interesting flavor to it about what happens to a kind man when he makes bad decisions."

The fable would stay with Ness, best known as an author of books for young adults, among them the popular "Chaos Walking" series and "A Monster Calls."

After achieving success in that genre, he's turned his attention to adult readers with "The Crane Wife," a love story based on the folk tale he heard as a child.

Ness, who has lived in London for many years, will read from the book at 7 p.m. tonight at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis.

His novel, which moves the story from Japan to London, centers on the newly created character of George, a divorced American trying to work out what went wrong with his life. After rescuing a wounded crane in his yard one night, he soon meets a mysterious woman, Kumiko, who changes his life.

The story allows Ness to explore kindness, which he said is rarely examined in fiction as writers aim to create tension.

"You never see kindness written about," Ness said. "And I thought what does a kind man do when he is lonely? And what does a kind man do when he falls in love and he is as insecure about falling in love as the rest of us? And that to me is a really interesting question."

Although the story takes place in the author's adopted city of London, Ness is quick to point out that George is much older than he is. But even though "The Crane Wife" is not an autobiography, Ness likens the ex-pat vantage point to that of a writer, an outsider who documents what he sees.

It's a skill that has been useful to Ness, particularly when he writes for young adults.

"I think the key to teenage writing is that every teenager feels like an outsider, no matter how popular, no matter how happy, it is the resting state of the teenager to feel like an outsider," he said. "And I kind of think that feeling follows us into adulthood a lot more than we acknowledge."

Ness wrote the "Chaos Walking" series about a young man living on a planet where everyone can hear what everyone else is thinking. They call it the Noise, and it drives everyone slightly crazy. Ness said the book is science fiction, but not that far from our everyday reality today.

"You can't go out in public and stand in a line without hearing somebody's cell phone conversation," he said.

He said the situation for teenagers is even worse as they live in a world where smart phones and the Internet mean a small mistake can be broadcast to everyone you know.

"So the next logical question is, what if you didn't have a choice, what if you had to share everything, and worse, what if you were young and had to share everything because in a way that's what it kind of feels like now, and I think that isn't a question without consequences. And I try not to be preachy about it. I try to be agnostic on the question, but I think it's a question that has to be asked: what is the cost of this?"

In "The Crane Wife," George also becomes a victim of the Internet age as the artwork he creates with the mysterious Kumiko becomes a web sensation, leaving him rich but bewildered, and ultimately bereft.