Overview

'Stunning, moving, and remarkable' Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child 'A celebration of complicity and love among women' Pilar Quintana, shortlisted for the National Book Award, author of The Bitch and Abyss 'I haven't been this swept away by a piece of historical fiction since Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet' Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins Paris, 1720. The Hospice of La Salpetriere is overrun with 'difficult' women. Halfway around the world, on the American frontier, French settlers are in want of wives. At the asylum, a list is drawn up: eighty-eight women of childbearing age to be shipped to New Orleans. Among them are Charlotte, Genevieve and Petronille - a sharp-tongued orphan, an accused abortionist and a rumoured madwoman. They make the voyage over the ocean, knowing nothing of the harsh and extraordinary lives that await them, or how they will come to love and betray each other time and again in this wild and beautiful land. Bold, thrilling and startlingly intimate, PELICAN GIRLS is a powerful vision of female friendship, identity and desire, and the choices women make in their unshakeable will to survive. For readers of Barbara Kingsolver, Lauren Groff and The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. 'A tale of female friendship unlike any I've come across before, Julia Malye's inspired-by-a-true-story Pelican Girls is as incredible a feat of research as it is a daring work of fiction' Elle's Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024

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9781472298218

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Reviews

Stunning, moving, and remarkable. Pelican Girls is more than a novel, it's an act of advocacy for human rights and for historical acknowledgment. Julia Malye has found a rich and compelling voice, unique to those who are experts in navigating between languages and cultures -- Nguyen Phan Que Mai A richly layered multi-character narrative of a long-overlooked period in history... Haunting, heartbreaking, and harrowing, Malye's story is one of survival and perseverance; it is a look into the lives of women who've had everything taken from them, but still manage to go on -- Virginia Reeves

Author Information

Julia Malye is the author of three novels published in France; she works as a creative writing instructor at Sciences Po Paris and as a translator for Les Belles Lettres publishing house. In 2015, she moved to the United States to study the craft of fiction and graduated from Oregon State University's MFA program in 2017. Since 2015, she's taught writing to hundreds of students, both in the United States at Oregon State University, and in France at La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Sciences Po Paris. Pelican Girls is her English-language debut, which she wrote concurrently in both French and English, and is being translated in twenty-five languages.

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