Cygnet: 'A clear-sighted, poignant rumination on loneliness, love, the melancholy of age'
Season Butler
Mar 2019 · Hachette UK
Ebook
256
Pages
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About this ebook
WINNER OF THE WRITERS' GUILD FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2020
ELLE ONES TO WATCH 2019
'Not since Holden Caulfield have I been so captivated by a first-person voice as the one Season Butler creates in Cygnet' Blake Morrison
'A bright new voice in literature' Bernardine Evaristo
'Terribly moving' China Miéville
'A beautiful book, a meander through the fluid anxiety of youth' Uzodinma Iweala
'[A] potent debut . . . A strange, promising beginning' Observer
The Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back months ago, and now their seventeen-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island.
Swan isn't just any island; it's home to an eccentric old age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland for a haven which is rapidly sinking into the ocean. The Kid's arrival threatens to burst the idyllic bubble that the elderly residents have so carefully constructed - an unwelcome reminder of the life they left behind, and one they want rid of.
Cygnet is the story of a young woman battling against the thrashing waves of loneliness and depression, and how she learns to find hope, laughter and her own voice in a world that's crumbling around her.
ELLE ONES TO WATCH 2019
'Not since Holden Caulfield have I been so captivated by a first-person voice as the one Season Butler creates in Cygnet' Blake Morrison
'A bright new voice in literature' Bernardine Evaristo
'Terribly moving' China Miéville
'A beautiful book, a meander through the fluid anxiety of youth' Uzodinma Iweala
'[A] potent debut . . . A strange, promising beginning' Observer
The Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back months ago, and now their seventeen-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island.
Swan isn't just any island; it's home to an eccentric old age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland for a haven which is rapidly sinking into the ocean. The Kid's arrival threatens to burst the idyllic bubble that the elderly residents have so carefully constructed - an unwelcome reminder of the life they left behind, and one they want rid of.
Cygnet is the story of a young woman battling against the thrashing waves of loneliness and depression, and how she learns to find hope, laughter and her own voice in a world that's crumbling around her.
About the author
Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg born in Washington, DC. Through her work, she explores her interest in identity and otherness, the opportunities and traps of hindsight and hope, and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. An early draft of Cygnet was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian Women. She lives and works between London and Berlin.
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