Cygnet: A Novel
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Winner of the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel
An utterly original coming-of-age tale, marked by wrenching humor and staggering charisma, about a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.
“Season Butler has written an imaginative, atmospheric and original novel that lingers in the memory long after reading. She is a bright new voice in literature.” —Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other
“It’s too hot for most of the clothes I packed to come here, when I thought this would only be for a week or two. My mother kissed me with those purple-brown lips of hers and said, we’ll be back, hold tight.”
The seventeen-year-old Kid doesn’t know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now Lolly is dead and the Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents and with no other relatives to turn to, she works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past by digitally retouching family photos and movies to earn enough money to survive.
Surrounded by the vast ocean, the Kid’s temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of the elderly who call themselves Wrinklies. They have left behind the youth-obsessed mainland—“the Bad Place”—to create their own alternative community, one where only the elderly are welcome. The adolescent’s presence on their island oasis unnerves the Wrinklies, turning some downright hostile. They don’t care if she has nowhere to go;they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they’ve left behind and are determined to forget.
But the Kid isn’t the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Wrinklies’ very existence there. The Kid’s own house edges closer to the seaside cliffs each day. To find a way forward, she must come to terms with the realities of her life, the inevitability of loss, and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.
Season Butler makes her literary debut with an ambitious work of bold imagination. Tough and tender, compassionate and ferocious, understated and provocative, Cygnet is a meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting, that explores what it means to find acceptance—of things gone and of those yet to come.
Season Butler
Season Butler is a writer and artist born in Washington, DC. She currently splits her time between London and Berlin. Cygnet is her first novel.
Related to Cygnet
Related ebooks
Grace: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Herland: Utopian Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao: The International Bestseller, now a major motion picture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Vietri Project: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Vida Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The City Son: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Blindfold Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Story of H: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Disoriental Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Soldier Boy: ‘This book is just what the world needs right now’ Louise Beech Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSmall Silent Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tears of the Black Man Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sweet Undoings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMan of My Time: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSuncatcher: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Ordinary Wonder: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Makes You Think You're Awake? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5October: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5everyman: a novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Girls Burn Brighter: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Language of Bodies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Heart Is a Burial Ground Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing up Chinese in South Africa Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSarah Phillips Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Muddy People: A Muslim Coming of Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seven Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe White Boy Shuffle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shine Shine Shine: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Once More with Feeling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Fiction For You
Prophet Song: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nigerwife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Salvage the Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Cygnet
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swan Island is a small fictional retirement island off the coast of New Hampshire. 'The Wrinklies' (as the teenage protagonist refers to them) fiercely guard the sanctity of their dream island home; those from the Bad Land (i.e. anywhere outside of the island) are only allowed onto the island one Friday in every month, when visits by relatives are tolerated and a resupply of recreational drugs is welcomed.The narrator is a 17 year old teenager who finds herself unwillingly coming-of-age in this alien environment, where her presence is accepted with strict limitations by the friendlier residents and abjectly abhorred by others. Left there 'for a few weeks' by her ill-equipped parents, the novel opens with the narrator now living alone in her late grandmother's house which is perilously close to falling off the edge of the eroding cliff face.This is a clever and unusual novel which plays with a reversal of the societal norms where it is usually the older generation who are left lonely and isolated. Tolerated but not fully accepted as part of the fabric of the island, this is a novel of loneliness and marginalisation, where the raw and remote natural beauty of the island idyll amplifies the narrator's feelings of desolation. Like any teenager she's conflicted between outwardly kicking back whilst inwardly desperately wanting to feel wanted and secure, and is terrified of leaving the island in case her parents are just about to come for her.Cygnet was one of the three debut books of the year picked out by the Sunday Times at this year's Cheltenham Festival. It's not a perfect novel - the author's greenness showed through in places (particularly towards the start of the novel) with occasional overworked prose, and I couldn't necessarily connect the narrator's voice with naturally being that of teenager. However, overall this novel engaged me much more than I'd expected it to. Its plot was fresh and highly original, and as a result it kept me hooked as I had no idea where she was taking me as a reader.To me, Season Butler is just cutting her teeth as an author, with bigger and better still to come. Although a new black voice in published fiction, she's no stranger to writing, having already carved out a career as a dramaturgist, creative writing teacher and academic. Her experience from academia was apparent - in this novel you could tell she didn't just want to tell a story but was also interested in exploring certain 'what if' scenarios and schools of thought. Her blurb states that she's interested in intersectional feminism and difference bias, and although Cygnet wasn't overtly covering those themes, her 'day job' of exploring ideas and concepts certainly added an unexpected depth to her writing.4 stars - imperfect yet enthralling nonetheless.