The Book of Goose is 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. It’s a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength. The celebrated author Yiyun Li will discuss her new novel with her fellow writer and colleague at Princeton, Idra Novey.

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.

Yiyun Li is the author of the novels Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; The Vagrants; and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and the memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She teaches creative writing at Princeton. Idra Novey’s novels are the acclaimed Those Who Knew; and Ways to Disappear. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian; The Next Country; and Clarice: The Visitor. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

This event is part of Labyrinth and the Public Library's joint programming and is cosponsored by Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts and Humanities Council.

LLL: Yiyun Li & Idra Novey, The Book of Goose -- a Novel