Book of Goose
Description
Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
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.
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Community Reviews
The Book of Goose is a novel about two friends. While they are very different people the author describes their friendship in a way that it is easily understood. They are young and poor, growing up in a small French village. Fabienne is the ringleader of their little band of misfits and she is quite the character. Most of the village is afraid of her and for good reason. She is often the culprit when an animal goes missing, or when something is d...read more
Agnes and Fabienne, these incredible characters, had me journeying through their struggles and victories, and they've permanently taken up residence in the depths of my soul.
The gorgeous cover has a NYT Book Review quote that says Li's "elegant metaphysics never elude the blood or maggots". I'm but sure about there being any metaphysics or maggots in this book- there isn't even much blood. Instead, it's a midrashic take on an account of a young French girl who was acclaimed as a writing prodigy and was later uncovered as a fraud. In this version, the true prodigy turns out to be her unruly and brilliant friend Fabien...read more
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