The Book of Goose

In 1966 Agnès, married to an American named Earl and living in Pennsylvania, learns from a postscript to her mother's letter that her childhood friend Fabienne has died in childbirth at twenty seven. The news sends her back to Saint Rémy, a poor farming village in postwar France, and to the early 1950s, when both girls were thirteen. Fabienne is the bold one, insolent and inventive, helping her drunken, widowed father on their farm; Agnès is the follower, glad to be led. To beat the boredom, Fabienne invents games, and the best of them is a book: she dictates a series of macabre stories about small children who die in ghastly ways, and Agnès, who has the neater hand, writes them down.

They draw in the recently widowed postmaster, M. Devaux, a writer himself, who helps get the stories published, and Fabienne decides that Agnès alone should take the credit. Agnès becomes a celebrated child author, the peasant girl with a morbid imagination. Then Fabienne, afraid Devaux might expose her as the real author, gets him drunk and falsely accuses him of trying to touch her, and he leaves the village in disgrace. Soon after, Agnès is sent to Woodsway, a finishing school in England run by the stern Mrs. Townsend. From England, Agnès keeps up the friendship by letter, some written by Fabienne in her own name and some in the name of an invented suitor, and the rules of their game grow harder to read.

Yiyun Li writes in plain, controlled sentences full of aphorism, and the book reads more like a fable than a historical novel; Tessa Hadley in the Guardian wrote that "we're not meant to succumb for a moment to its illusion." Comparisons with Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels are everywhere, though Megan O'Grady in the New York Times Book Review was reminded instead of Fleur Jaeggy and Muriel Spark, and called it "the most propulsively entertaining of Li's novels." Sarah Chihaya in the Atlantic warned that it is a "subtle and evasive book" that keeps its secrets. The meaning of the title waits for the last pages. It suits readers who like their friendships dangerous and their narrators not entirely to be trusted.