The Book of Goose

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.