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There was an error. Search Filter + * * * * * * * Clear all * * * * * * * Clear all BOOK DETAILS THE BOOK OF GOOSE A NOVEL Author: Yiyun Li Honors HONORS * PEN/Faulkner Award Winner * PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee * BookPage Best Books of the Year * Buzzfeed Best Books of the Year * Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year * Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide * New Yorker Best Books of the Year * Powell's Best Books of the Year * San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * Slate Best Books of the Year * Time Magazine Best Books of the Year * Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year Read Excerpt THE BOOK OF GOOSE Author: Yiyun Li YOU CANNOT CUT AN APPLE with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. You can, if you have a knife, cut an apple or an orange. Or slice open the underbelly of a fish. Or, if your hands are steady enough and the blade is sharp enough, sever an umbilical cord. You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder. You can hand the knife to another person, betting with yourself how deep a wound he or she is willing to inflict. You can be the inflicter of the wound. One half orange plus another half orange do not make a full orange again. And that is where my story begins. An orange that did not think itself good enough for a knife, and an orange that never dreamed of turning itself into a knife. Cut and be cut, neither interested me back then. MY NAMES IS AGNÈS, but that is not important. You can go into an orchard with a list of names and write them on the oranges, Françoise and Pierre and Diane and Louis, but what difference does it make? What matters to an orange is its orange-ness. The same with me. My name could have been Clémentine, or Odette, or Henrietta, but so? An orange is just an orange, as a doll is a doll. Don’t think that once you name a doll, it is different from other dolls. You can bathe it and clothe it and feed it empty air and put it to bed with the lullabies you imagine a mother should be singing to a baby. All the same, the doll, like all dolls, cannot even be called dead, as it was never alive. The name you should pay attention to in this story is Fabienne. Fabienne is not an orange or a knife or a singer of lullabies, but she can make herself into any one of those things. Well, she once could. She is dead now. The news of her death arrived in a letter from my mother, the last of my family still living in Saint Rémy, though my mother was not writing particularly to report the death, but the birth of her own first great-grandchild. Had I remained near her, she would have questioned why I have not given birth to a baby to be added to her collection of grandchildren. This is one good thing about living in America. I am too far away to be her concern. But long before my marriage I stopped being her concern—my fame took care of that. America and fame: they are equally useful if you want freedom from your mother. In the postscript of the letter, my mother wrote that Fabienne died the previous month—“de la même manière que sa sœur Joline”—in the same manner as her sister. Joline had died in 1946 in childbirth, when she was seventeen. Fabienne died in 1966, at twenty-seven. You would think twenty years would make childbirth less a killer of women, you would think the same calamity should never strike a family twice, but if you think that way you are likely to be called an idiot by someone, as Fabienne used to call me. My first reaction, after I read the postscript: I wanted to get pregnant right away. I would carry a baby to term and I would give birth to a child without dying myself—I knew this with the certainty that I knew my name. This would be proof that I could do something Fabienne could not—be a bland person, who is neither favored nor disfavored by life. A person without a fate. (This desire, I imagine, can be truly understood only by people with a fate, so it is a desire akin to wishful thinking.) But you need two people to get pregnant; and then two people do not necessarily guarantee success. Getting pregnant, in my case, would involve looking for a man with whom I could cheat on Earl (then what—explaining to him a bastard would still be better than a barren marriage?), or divorcing him for a man who can sow and reap better. Neither appeals to me. Earl loves me, and I love being married to him. The fact that he cannot give me a child may be disheartening to him, but I have told him that I did not marry him to become a mother. In any case we are both realists. Earl left the Army Corps of Engineers after we moved back from France and now works for his father, a well-respected contractor. I have a vegetable garden, which I started in our backyard, and I raise chickens, two dozen at any time. I was hoping to add to my charges some goats, but the two kids I acquired had a habit of chewing the wooden fence and running away. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is not Saint Rémy, and I cannot turn myself back into a goatherd. “A French bride” is how I was first known to the local people, and some, long after I stopped being a new wife (we have been married for six years now), still refer to me by that name. Earl likes it. A French bride adds luster to his life, but a French bride chasing goats down a street would be an embarrassment. I gave up the goats and decided to raise geese instead. Last spring, I acquired my first two, a pair of Toulouse geese, and this year I purchased a pair of Chinese geese. Earl read the catalogue and joked that we should go on adding American geese and African geese and Pomeranian geese and Shetland geese each year. Let’s have a troupe of international brigands, he said. But he forgot that the two couples will soon be parents. In a year I will be expecting goslings. The geese, more than the chickens, are my children. Earl likes the geese, too, and he was the one to suggest that we give them French names. His French is not as good as he thinks, but that has not stopped him from speaking the language to me in our most intimate moments. I always speak English to the people in my American life. I speak English to my chickens and geese. The garden produces more vegetables than we can consume. I share them with my in-laws—Earl’s parents and his two brothers and their families. They are all nice to me, even though they find me foreign, and perhaps laughable. They call me Mother Goose behind my back. This I learned from Lois, my sister-in-law, who is unhappily married and who hopes to turn me against the Barrs family. I don’t mind the nickname, though. It may be insensitive of them to call a childless woman Mother Goose, but I am far from being a sensitive or sentimental woman. When Earl asked about my mother’s letter, I told him about the birth of my grandniece, but not the death of Fabienne. If he detected anything unusual, he would assume that another baby’s birth reminded me of the void in my life. He is a loving husband, but love does not often lead to perception. When I met him, he thought I was a young woman with no secrets and few stories from my childhood and girlhood. Perhaps it is not his fault that I cannot get pregnant. The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow. I was in such a trance that I forgot to separate the geese from the chickens at their mealtime. The geese had a busy time terrorizing and robbing the chickens. I chastised them without raising my voice. Fabienne would have laughed at my incompetency. She would have told me that I should simply give the geese a good kick. But Fabienne is dead. Whatever she does now, she has to do as a ghost. I would not mind seeing Fabienne’s ghost. All ghosts claim their phantom skills: to shape-shift, to haunt, to see things we don’t see, to determine how the lives of the living people turn out. If dead people had no choice but to become ghosts, Fabienne’s ghost would only scoff at the usual tricks that other ghosts take pride in. Her ghost would do something entirely different. (Like what, Agnès? Like making me write again.) No, it is not Fabienne’s ghost that has licked the nib of my pen clean, or opened the notebook to this fresh page, but sometimes one person’s death is another person’s parole paper. I may not have gained full freedom, but I am free enough. Copyright © 2022 by Yiyun Li The Book of Goose $18.00 Available in Digital Audio! Trade PaperbackHardcoverDigital Audioe-Book Format Buy Now Honors HONORS * PEN/Faulkner Award Winner * PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee * BookPage Best Books of the Year * Buzzfeed Best Books of the Year * Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year * Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide * New Yorker Best Books of the Year * Powell's Best Books of the Year * San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * Slate Best Books of the Year * Time Magazine Best Books of the Year * Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year The Book of Goose Author: Yiyun Li $18.00 Trade PaperbackHardcoverDigital Audioe-Book Format BUY THIS BOOK FROM: Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-a-Million Bookshop Powells Target Reviews REVIEWS FROM GOODREADS ABOUT THIS BOOK A propulsive, gripping new novel about fate, art, exploitation, and intimacy by the award-winning author of Where Reasons End. Read More Page Count 368 Genre Literary Fiction On Sale 08/08/2023 BOOK DETAILS 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. Imprint Publisher Picador ISBN 9781250872418 IN THE NEWS “An atmospheric and evocative coming-of-age story.” —Elizabeth Crachiolo, Historical Novel Society “An interesting cassoulet of friendship, fantasy, and the predatory nature of fame . . . Yiyun Li presents her readers with a fascinating question: What is real — the stories the world concocts about us or the ones we fabricate about ourselves?” —Patricia Schultheis, Washington Independent Review of Books “A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will.” —San Francisco Bay Times (Top of Your Stack) “Take the knife that Li offers, cut through all these outer trappings, and you find something much more mysterious. Though it is ostensibly a realist historical novel about the lives of women and girls in mid-century France...The Book of Goose secretly dwells in the realm of fairy tale . . . [Li explores] the strange power of the myths we form about the people who shape us.” —Sarah Chihaya, The Atlantic “There is a fairy-tale atmosphere, mystery as deep and dark as the soil, but also specific historical context . . . Everything is conveyed through layers of translation, subjectivity and invention. The impact is profound.” —Max Liu, The i Paper “A novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the nature of reality and the truth quotient of fact, memory and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – so much more ‘fatal’, as Agnès puts it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight.” —Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian “This is a novel of deceptions and cruelty . . . But within this somber mood is something brilliant. With characteristic poise, Li depicts the intricacies of ordinary lives: childhood friendship, growing up, and existences as slow as the passively ‘floating’ geese Agnès watches.” —Francesca Peacock, The Spectator “Li’s books render the world so sharply that they might draw blood, but they are also shot through, I think, with an extraordinary hopefulness . . . they possess a fullness, a deep love of both language and character.” —Lynn Steger Strong, The Los Angeles Times “A compulsively readable meditation on how our closest friendships harbor both love and hate—and how we can fail each other over and over again . . . Li’s crystalline, insightful prose adds incredible depth to the drama, yet the dynamic between the girls remains the complex heart of The Book of Goose.” —Sarah Rose Etter, BOMB “A subtly suspenseful and inventive novel of friendship, opportunism, fame, fantasy, success and survival.” —BookBrowse (five-star review) “Not since John Knowles' A Separate Peace has a novel wrung such drama from two teens standing face to face on a tree branch.” —Kevin Canfield, Star Tribune “Haunting . . . The Book of Goose is a fascinating period piece . . . focused on the prickly relationship between [Li’s] two central characters . . . The Book of Goose itself is a spiky, scratchy, unsettling thing; and it’s all the more interesting and impressive for it.” —Lucy Scholes, Financial Times "Li, of course, has never been the kind of writer who tells you what you want to hear, and this is surely part of why she has become, while still in her 40s, one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots." —Megan O’Grady, The New York Times “Li narrates from the fringes of her own experience, subverting the notion that a writer should be bounded by her own identity, that identity is both personal property and territory to be defended. She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way." —Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times Magazine “Li has proven herself a master storyteller.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire (Best Books of Fall) “Come for the writerly scheming, stay for the exquisitely calibrated examination of how our most tender and important bonds involve the manipulation of power and devotion.” —Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times (most anticipated) "Yiyun Li’s extraordinary new novel is a multivalent exploration of friendship and love, experience and exploitation, fate and futility, the slippage between reality and artifice . . . brilliant.” —Carolyn Oliver, On the Seawall “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) “Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive friendships that can occur between two girls . . . The Book of Goose is an elegant and disturbing novel about exploitation and acquiescence, notoriety and obscurity, and whether you choose your life or are chosen by it.” —Lauren Bufford, BookPage (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 Show More Show Less ABOUT THE CREATORS * Author YIYUN LI Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and... Learn More SIGN UP FOR AUTHOR ALERTS Enter your email to stay up to date on any tours & events in your area as well as new releases or exciting news related to Yiyun Li. Your Email Address* A valid Email is required. Submit The Book of Goose $18.00 Available in Digital Audio! Trade PaperbackHardcoverDigital Audioe-Book Format Buy Now Honors HONORS * PEN/Faulkner Award Winner * PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee * BookPage Best Books of the Year * Buzzfeed Best Books of the Year * Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year * Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide * New Yorker Best Books of the Year * Powell's Best Books of the Year * San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * Slate Best Books of the Year * Time Magazine Best Books of the Year * Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year The Book of Goose Author: Yiyun Li $18.00 Trade PaperbackHardcoverDigital Audioe-Book Format BUY THIS BOOK FROM: Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-a-Million Bookshop Powells Target Reviews REVIEWS FROM GOODREADS OTHER BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY STICKER JIGSAW: THE WIZARD OF OZ By L. 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