07/18/2022

Li follows Must I Go with an intriguing novel of two devious teenage friends who are coping with the aftermath of WWII. Fabienne helps her drunken father, a widower, on their Saint Rèmy farm, and her friend Agnès lives with her parents and attends the village school. One of their “games” involves Fabienne dictating a series of stories about little children who die in various ghastly ways, which Agnès records in a notebook that they share with the recently widowed postmaster, M. Devaux, whose friendship they pursue on a lark. Devaux, an author himself, helps get them published, and Agnès, whom Fabienne decides should get sole credit, becomes famous. Her rise from peasant girl to author becomes a big story, and she is given free education at a finishing school in England. Then, on a whim, Fabienne lies and frames Devaux for a drunken sexual assault on her, forcing him to leave town in disgrace. As the story unfolds, Agnès reckons with a frightening series of episodes in which she takes on Fabienne’s mischievous traits. Bringing to mind Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, by way of Anita Brookner’s quietly dramatic prose, this makes for a powerful Cinderella fable with memorable characters. It’s an accomplished new turn for Li. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

"[The Book of Goose] is mysterious, but it bears its mystery lightly, with Li’s understated style touching on large ideas—such as the unswerving quality of childhood friendships or the discordant relationship between time and memory . . . In moving from writing about the resoundingly 'empty words' of communist thought to the dilemmas in absolute freedom, Li seems to be exploring just this special way of knowing that the novel, in her expert hands, continues to offer."
—Anjum Hasan, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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

09/01/2022

Two adolescent girls, Agnes and Fabienne, share an unusual friendship in a rural French village in the years following World War II. Spurred on by family trauma and Fabienne's dark imagination, the girls, with the assistance of a widowed postmaster, write a book of morbid tales. For reasons she doesn't explain, Fabienne wants Agnes to be the "face" of the book, which they manage to publish. Agnes briefly becomes a sensation, is declared a prodigy, and is whisked away to a British boarding school led by Mrs. Townsend, who has motives of her own. Thematically, Li's novel shares similarities with Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels," depicting an intense friendship between intelligent, impoverished girls and what happens when one has opportunities to broaden her scope. However, this latest from MacArthur fellow Li (Must I Go) is more tightly focused, and the nature of the relationship between the two girls differs in some striking ways from Ferrante's work. VERDICT Li's understated prose belies the intensity of the emotions being depicted, and the story takes many unpredictable turns. Knowing only that the adult Agnes married an American, lives in the United States, and keeps geese, readers don't learn the meaning of the title until the novel's end. Highly recommended.—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

★ 2022-06-08
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story—and is it your story to tell? (Apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda.)

Inseparable young teens Agnès and Fabienne share a world they’ve created for themselves in rural, ruined, post–World War II France. Fabienne is unschooled and rebellious, while the more passive Agnès is disenfranchised from her schoolmates and family members. A “game” concocted by the girls—that of writing stories so the world will (ostensibly) know how they lived—launches a series of events that propels Agnès to Paris and London and into the publishing world and a finishing school, while Fabienne remains at home in their rural village, tending to farm animals. The arc of their intense adolescent friendship comes under Agnès’ critical lens when she learns of Fabienne’s death after years of emotional and geographic distance between the two. Now freed to write her own story, Agnès narrates the course of events which thrust her into the world as a teen prodigy at the same time she was removed, reluctantly, from Fabienne’s orbit. Li’s measured and exquisite delivery of Agnès’ revelations conveys the balance and rebalance of the girls’ relationship over time but also illuminates the motivations of writers (fame, revenge, escape) and how power within a relationship mutates and exploits. The combination the girls bring to their intimate relationship and endeavors (one seeking to experience things she could not achieve alone, the other providing the experiences) leads Agnès first to believe they were two halves of a whole. 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.