Parakeet

From the acclaimed author of Beautyland comes "a surrealist rendering of an ambivalent bride and the traumas she can't outrun no matter the occasion" (Hillary Kelly, Vulture).

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A Best Book of the Year at Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Refinery29

A Best Book of the Month at Entertainment Weekly, Hello Giggles, and PopSugar

A Best Book of Summer at Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, Alma, Subway Book Review, and Lit Hub

The week of her wedding, the Bride is visited by her dead grandmother. Her grandmother is a parakeet. She tells the Bride not to get married. She says: Find your brother. And so the Bride's march to the altar becomes a strange, revelatory journey confronting matters long buried.

Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions: How do our memories make, cage, and free us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change? A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet is a joyful, startling exploration of self and connection.

"Darkly comic and vulnerable and true." —Bess Kalb, The New York Times Book Review

"Mournful, witty, and heartbreakingly honest." —Seija Rankin and David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly (Best Book of June)

"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts." —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29

"Madcap, mythic, and exact—a tender, potent tragicomedy written with unapologetic panache." —Claire Vaye Watkins, Electric Literature