2023 Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
by 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.
A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
Named for William Faulkner, who used his Nobel Prize funds to create an award for young writers, and affiliated with PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists), the international writers' organization, the PEN/Faulkner Award was founded by writers in 1980 to honor their peers. It is now the largest juried award for fiction in the United States.