Parakeet: A Novel

Written by Marie-Helene Bertino

Narrated by Angela Dawe

Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.

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.

A Macmillan Audio produciton from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250752871

Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow. Her work has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Story Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction and has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Yale.

Reviews for Parakeet

[Mary · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Odd story line. Story was Hard to follow at times.

[Jade Gage · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Surreal, gorgeous, complex. Not everyone's cup of tea, this book is more like whiskey neat. The writing is gorgeous, and I found myself pausing several times an hour to ponder some of the things she mentioned almost casually, paradigm-shifting insights of women and men. Highly recommended as a thinking woman's read.

[ChristineAnitaYelichRoberts · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Couldn’t get past 6 minutes of this reader. No passion. I’ll have to read it.