Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other places. Her accolades include the Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Windham-Campbell prize, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

She also holds the not-inconsequential accolade of being one of our bookseller Matthew's favourite writers of all time. And now she joins us for her new novel The Book of Goose, a propulsive, gripping new novel about fate, art, exploitation, and intimacy.

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story.

As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes 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.