EDITORS' CHOICE AT
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
"Miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting." —Lauren Groff, author of
Florida
"A twisting, strange delight,
Parakeet
shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts." —
Kristen Iversen,
Refinery29
Acclaimed author of
2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas
Marie-Helene Bertino's
is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.
The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks:
What is the Internet?
Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says:
Go and find your brother.
In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.
A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today,
asks and begins to answer the essential questions. How do our memories make, cage, and free us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change?
Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly,
is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.
A Best Book of 2020 at
Lit Hub, Electric Literature
, and
A Best Book of Summer at
Vulture
,
Refinery29,
Yahoo! Life,
Alma
Subway Book Review
Lit Hub
A Best Book of the Month at
Entertainment Weekly
Hello Giggles
PopSugar