The Book of the Goose

Fabienne died. Her best friend from childhood, Agnès, learns this news in America, far from the French village where the girls grew up. They haven’t seen each other for more than ten years, but only now Agnès feels free—and decides to tell her story.

Her unusual biography is known to many: a thirteen-year-old village girl wrote a book that caught the attention of publishers and critics. Agnès Moreau became famous, and a brilliant future awaited her. The owner of an elite English school for girls offered to give her an education for free. But the success story ended almost as soon as it began—within a few months, the girl was expelled from the boarding school. Her second book passed almost unnoticed; she never wrote the third. Yet these rises and falls didn’t truly bother Agnès much, because they were only part of a sophisticated game invented by Fabienne.