Wild Geese
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
Irish novelist Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel is an intimate sprawl of memory, migration, and queer desire—charting the messy layers of love and loss that constitute a life.
Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she’s overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen. Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants. But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she’d left behind. Over the course of a weekend, their romance rekindles into something sweet and radically unfamiliar as Grace helps Phoebe navigate the jagged edges of nostalgia and hope.
Written with wit and warmth, Wild Geese is a tale of dislocations and relocations, encounters, and accidents: a novel of past lives, messy feelings, and the desire to start afresh.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emmanuel debuts with a lyrical and bittersweet meditation on memory and trans identity set over the course of one weekend. Phoebe is a 30-year-old PhD candidate leading a solitary existence in Copenhagen ("By living alone," she narrates, "I am indeed surrounding myself only with those who put me at ease"). Her self-containment is shattered when she receives a visit from Grace, a mercurial ex-girlfriend from her pre-transition days, whom she hasn't seen in seven years. The two catch up as they stroll through the city, taking in tourist attractions like the Tivoli Gardens amusement park and the bronze Little Mermaid statue, and stumble over each other's words. For Phoebe, answering Grace's questions about transition feels like "pulling legs off a spider." Grace's motives for the visit remain vague, and the pair's reconnection feels tentative. Even after they fall back into bed together, Phoebe wonders what to do with their complex history ("All romances are an accumulation of references... peculiar and impenetrable, elusive, even evasive"). Emmanuel's nearly plotless novel can at times be all of these things too, yet each page contains beautiful sentences as the two women seek clues about their future. This is one to savor.
Customer Reviews
An amazing book
This book is as brainy as it is introspective. It’s about the pain of human existence and how people search for hope. A brilliant work. Cannot wait to read more from this author.