Parakeet, Italian cover, April 2021, designed by Sofia Paravicini
*New York Times Editors’ Choice*
*Longlisted for Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction*
*Longlisted for 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Award for Fiction*
*Best Novels of 2020 by Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Huffington Post, Refinery 29*
*Kirkus star, ALA Booklist star, Library Journal star, Highly Anticipated at The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, The Millions, Alma, The Rumpus, and Lit Hub*
“Disquieting and darkly comic and vulnerable and true,” The New York Times
“Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered,” Booklist
“Mournful, witty, and heartbreakingly honest,” Entertainment Weekly
“Bizarre and profound,” Dan Sheehan for Lit Hub
“Witty, raw, and masterfully chaotic,” Huffington Post
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“Smart and tender, tough and weird. This is a tremendous novel,” Bookreporter
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, Parakeet 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, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.
“This is a book with a rare and brave hunger for feelings. Chaos and mystery are not something done to its people. The magic rises from who they are. To read Parakeet is to walk through the Bride’s memory, trauma, grief, pain, fear, and joy, antechamber after antechamber.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus, for Electric Literature
“Marie-Helene Bertino’s fiction is miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting. Parakeet is a strange book in the greatest sense: it sunders reality in sudden transformations and slippages, in the depth of its aches, in the beauty it insists upon in the face of violence, and in the powerful joy that Bertino dowses deep under the surface of even the bleakest moments of her characters’ lives.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Florida
“Marie-Helene Bertino is an expert in breaking a heart so cleanly that it releases actual magic. Give up your idea of what a book is allowed to be, and she will show you the whole quivering universe.”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
“Marie-Helene Bertino is one of my favorite writers working today, and her latest is one rare gem of a novel. In Bertino’s hands, anything seems possible, from a dead grandmother returning in the form of a bird to finding unexpected wonder in our strange and broken world, profound redemptions of the heart. Parakeet enchants and enthralls.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel