In 1954, Françoise Sagan scandalised literary France with Bonjour Tristesse, a slender tale of adolescent betrayal and revenge written when she was a teenager. In her sly, profound new novel, award-winning author Yiyun Li imagines a pair of 13-year-olds whose inky scheming will see them break into print in that same era with calamitous results.
Best friends Agnès and Fabienne are so different they complete each other; the former obedient, devoted, the latter feral but brilliant. They’ve grown up together in the impoverished French village of Saint Rémy, whose mud and meadows, madmen and drunks anchor The Book of Goose, infusing its imagery and its aphoristic musings, even though Agnès narrates it from the vantage point of a very different life more than a decade on.
