Synopses & Reviews
Have you ever wanted to disappear and make a new life for yourself where no one knows your name?
Ten White Geese is the eagerly anticipated, internationally bestselling new novel by the winner of the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction.
A woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. An Emily Dickinson scholar, she has fled Amsterdam, having just confessed to an affair. On the farm she finds ten geese. One by one they disappear. Who is this woman? Will her husband manage to find her? The young man who stays the night: why wont he leave? And the vanishing geese?
Set against a stark and pristine landscape, and with a seductive blend of solace and menace, this novel of stealth intrigue summons from a woman's silent longing fugitive moments of profound beauty and compassion.
Review
“The exquisitely clear style of Ten White Geese, in this beautifully natural translation, sustains a tightly controlled and tense story as it gradually reveals itself, ever surprising and suspenseful and impossible to predict from one page to the next. A powerful, unusual, and engrossing novel.” Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance
Review
Ten White Geese is unlike anything I have read. In language deceptively spare and almost excruciatingly precise, it lays at our feet a host of secrets that will not yield to waking logic. It will stretch and vex and haunt, this novel; it has the queer, ruthless beauty of a dream.” Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others
Review
“I loved Gerbrand Bakker's beautiful novel The Twin, but nothing could have prepared me for the singular experience of reading Ten White Geese. Mr. Bakker illuminates the beautiful, tragic darkness at the core of every life with a meticulously honest compassion that is both heartbreaking and revivifying. This book stopped me in my tracks, and moved me beyond words.” Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Review
“A beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us....Assured and mature....Even more powerful [than The Twin].” John Burnside, The Guardian (London)
Review
“Simple and devastating....Written and translated with lapidary precision, perspective, and crisp prose; there is emotion and expression, but held back from the writing, which is controlled and full of clean, physical detail." The Independent (London)
Review
“A novel full of hints and mysteries [that] will almost certainly keep you rooted to your chair until the dénouement.” The Spectator (London)
About the Author
Gerbrand Bakker won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first novel,
The Twin. An avid gardener, he lives in Holland.
David Colmer is the translator of Bakker's novel The Twin.