The great deception: The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as ‘Call me Ishmael’. But there’s a reason for this. Agnès Moreau, the narrator of Yiyun Li’s disconcerting, mesmerising fifth novel The Book of Goose, only became a storyteller by accident.

Writing from Pennsylvania, where the ‘French bride’ Agnès raises geese, she remembers post-war rural France and her childhood in Saint Rémy. She and her friend Fabienne, avoiding other girls their age, spent their days lying among gravestones and minding cows – until Fabienne decides that they should write a book together.

Most popular

Francis Pike

The weapon that could end America’s global supremacy

Fabienne’s stories are dark – dead babies, dead children, dead animals – and the girls enlist the help of the local postmaster, M. Deveaux, to publish the volume. This is where Agnès’s accidental authorship comes in: the work appears with only her name on it, and it is she who must endure the undeserved fame of child prodigy.