Li returns to Fourth Estate with 'mesmerising' new novel after exclusive submission

Yiyun Li is returning to Fourth Estate with a “mesmerising” new novel following an exclusive submission.

Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth volume rights, including audio, from Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency to The Book of Goose and a collection of stories. North American rights have been acquired in a two-book deal by Mitzi Angel at FSG. The Book of Goose will publish simultaneously in the UK and US in hardback in September 2022 and has been slated as the publisher’s “standout literary publication for autumn". 

The novel follows “girlhood friendship and obsession” which winds from the post-war rural provinces of France to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past. 

It opens with news that 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 10 years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a 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 "a soaring trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss". 

Li’s previous three novels were published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK. She is the recipient of many awards, including The Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Prize, the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize.  

Widyaratna said: “Yiyun Li is one of our most important writers, treasured by readers for her remarkable novels, exceptional short stories and essential non-fiction. It is a great joy for all of us at Fourth Estate that she is returning to the list where she was first published in the UK. The Book of Goose is an endlessly fascinating, provocative and beautiful novel that engages deeply with questions of freedom and agency. We can’t wait for readers to meet Agnès and Fabienne.” 

Li added: "I’m thrilled with this return to the Fourth Estate, where I began as a new writer. For the past two years of the pandemic, Agnès and Fabienne have been my strange companions, who delight, surprise, upset, and ultimately haunt me. I can’t wait to work with the team to publish The Book of Goose.”