Cygnet

Reviews / Votes

Coming-of-age fiction is a well-established genre but I doubt there's ever been a novel in which the narrator turns 18 on an island exclusively occupied by oldsters. And not since Holden Caulfield have I been so captivated by a first-person voice as the one Season Butler creates in Cygnet: 'kiddo' or 'small-fry' as the Wrinklies call her is super-bright but also naive, tough-minded but also vulnerable, self-reliant but also adrift. How long will she remain on the island? How long will the island itself remain, increasingly eroded by the ocean as it is? Will her parents arrive in time to celebrate her birthday? We don't know, but this sad, funny, highly original novel keeps us turning the pages to find out * Blake Morrison, Author of Things my Mother Never Told Me * Season Butler is an extraordinary writer. In this wonderful novel the narrative voice is rhythmic and compelling, telling a coming of age story which resonates with our times. Like Colson Whitehead, her work is fearless in its inventiveness. I've always thought Season was the real deal, this book proves that she has arrived * Julia Bell, Author, The Dark Light * Terribly moving. A clear-sighted, poignant rumination on loneliness, love, the melancholy of age and of youth - and, in its quiet way, the end of the world * China Mieville * Season Butler has written an imaginative, atmospheric and original novel that lingers in the memory long after reading . . . A bright new voice in literature * Bernardine Evaristo * An original novel with a memorable narrator * Elle (Eight Books to Devour) * An uncanny meditation on mortality and intergenerational distrust * Metro * [A] potent debut . . . A strange, promising beginning * Observer * [A] vivid, poetic debut * Daily Mail * As sixteen-year old environmental activist Greta Thunberg has shown us, teenagers are the ideal candidates for raising consciousness about our planetary plight. Kid's ardent voice powers Cygnet. Her expression of the loneliness, boredom and rage she feels at her circumstances is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield . . . the characters have real emotional depth . . . Cygnet is both very funny and convincingly tragic, its young narrator memorably charismatic and self-aware * Literary Review * Season Butler (in her novel Cygnet) describ[es] an island occupied, with one exception, by geriatrics - the exception being the narrator, whose wise reflections on age, race, class and global warming belie her tender youth -- Blake Morrison * New Internationalist *