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Parakeet

A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

Narrator Angela Dawe

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Length 6 hours 54 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“How often can you say you have a new favorite book? For me, it's been almost two decades since I last crowned a book as my favorite (The Giant's House, by Elizabeth McCracken.) What is as weird and delightful and sardonic and cynical and ultimately life-affirming as that reigning champion? Parakeet. Oh my God, Parakeet! When I got to the end of Parakeet, I took a reflective 90 seconds and then literally went back to the beginning to listen to it again. And I loved it even more the second time. This novel of identity, family, trauma, estrangement, and bereavement is like Kafka on helium. Every metaphor is reality, and every reality a metaphor. In the very first sentence, our narrator (known only as the Bride) reconnects with her long dead grandmother in the form of a parakeet, but this is only the first of many cases of transmogrification, mirroring, transition, and identity crisis. Somehow both zany and melancholic, this surprising little novel is ultimately exhilarating, and narrator Angela Dawe's perfect deadpan strikes the exact right tone throughout.”
— Rachel • The Book Table

Summary
About the author

Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.

The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet?

Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother.

In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.

A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, 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?

Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.

A Macmillan Audio produciton from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Fiction Fiction - Literary

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.