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Sign up todayThe Book of Goose
A Novel
Narrator
Caroline Hewitt
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Length
9 hours 1 minute
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li is a beautifully told tale of friendship, obsession, power and creativity. Childhood friends Agnes and Fabienne entertain themselves by spinning tales about the strange characters and situations in their post-war French province. As in many intense friendships, one is the leader and one the follower but with a twist. They collaborate on a novel based on the people around them with Agnes writing down Fabienne's almost stream of consciousness genius. When a publisher shows interest, Fabienne insists it be Agnes' name on the cover thus propelling Agnes into fame and a life outside their town. ”
— Samantha • A Great Good Place for Books
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Reviews
“Exquisite . . . Knives, minerals, oranges, and the game of Rock Paper Scissors sneak into Agnès’ narrative as she relates the trajectory of a once-unbreakable union. The relative hardness of those substances is a clue to understanding it all. Stunners: Li’s memorable duo, their lives, their losses.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Bringing to mind Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, by way of Anita Brookner’s quietly dramatic prose, [The Book of Goose] makes for a powerful Cinderella fable with memorable characters. It’s an accomplished new turn for Li.”
—Publishers Weekly
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