The Book of Goose
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout – I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson
‘One of our finest living authors … propulsively entertaining’ New York Times
‘Wonderfully strange and alive’ Jon McGregor
A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.
As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.
A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie.
‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail
‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator
‘For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry…resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout… electrifying’ Observer
About the author
Yiyun Li is the author of six books of fiction and two books of nonfiction, including Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other places. Her accolades include the Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Windham-Campbell prize, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She teaches at Princeton University, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Li follows Must I Go with an intriguing novel of two devious teenage friends who are coping with the aftermath of WWII. Fabienne helps her drunken father, a widower, on their Saint Rèmy farm, and her friend Agnès lives with her parents and attends the village school. One of their "games" involves Fabienne dictating a series of stories about little children who die in various ghastly ways, which Agnès records in a notebook that they share with the recently widowed postmaster, M. Devaux, whose friendship they pursue on a lark. Devaux, an author himself, helps get them published, and Agnès, whom Fabienne decides should get sole credit, becomes famous. Her rise from peasant girl to author becomes a big story, and she is given free education at a finishing school in England. Then, on a whim, Fabienne lies and frames Devaux for a drunken sexual assault on her, forcing him to leave town in disgrace. As the story unfolds, Agnès reckons with a frightening series of episodes in which she takes on Fabienne's mischievous traits. Bringing to mind Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, by way of Anita Brookner's quietly dramatic prose, this makes for a powerful Cinderella fable with memorable characters. It's an accomplished new turn for Li.
