The Book of Goose
A Novel
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3.8 • 89 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Slate Top Ten Book of the Year
A TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more.
A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
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 war-ravaged 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.
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.
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