Parakeet

"What is Parakeet about? It’s about an ambivalent bride. It’s about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, bad mothers, womanhood, monogamy and the nature of time itself. It’s about being a woman trapped by her subconscious and social conventions. It's a Homeric quest to reclaim control over the heroine's own life and sanity . . . Deeply funny . . . disquieting and darkly comic and vulnerable and true . . . Bertino's writing is lyrical and sharp."—Bess Kalb, The New York Times Book Review

"Parakeet contains so much more than the typical wedding narrative: it’s a surrealist rendering of an ambivalent bride and the traumas she can’t outrun no matter the occasion . . . As more of the bride’s memories are unfurled and dissected, her forays into other dimensions become both rational and revelatory."—Hillary Kelly, Vulture

"Strange in all the most wondrous ways, Parakeet is a dazzling hybridic work of riotous humor and aching pathos, a cold feet fantasia of outlandish and extraordinary proportions, and, above all else, an exquisitely written mediation on buried trauma and grief. I’ll bet good money that this shimmering, dreamlike novel is unlike any you’ve read before. A rare bird indeed."—Dan Sheehan, Lit Hub

"The voice is madcap, mythic, and exact—a tender, potent tragicomedy written with unapologetic panache . . . This is a book with a rare and brave hunger for feelings. Chaos and mystery are not something done to its people. The magic rises from who they are. To read Parakeet is to walk through the Bride’s memory, trauma, grief, pain, fear, and joy, antechamber after antechamber."—Claire Vaye Watkins, Electric Literature

"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts."—Kristen Iversen, Refinery29

"Bertino tells a complex story about family, responsibility and the need to become our best selves."—The Millions

“Marie-Helene Bertino's fiction is miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting. Parakeet is a strange book in the greatest sense: it sunders reality in sudden transformations and slippages, in the depth of its aches, in the beauty it insists upon in the face of violence, and in the powerful joy that Bertino dowses deep under the surface of even the bleakest moments of her characters' lives.”—Lauren Groff, author of Florida

“Marie-Helene Bertino is an expert in breaking a heart so cleanly that it releases actual magic. Give up your idea of what a book is allowed to be, and she will show you the whole quivering universe.”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

“Marie-Helene Bertino is one of my favorite writers working today, and her latest is one rare gem of a novel. In Bertino’s hands, anything seems possible, from a dead grandmother returning in the form of a bird to finding unexpected wonder in our strange and broken world, profound redemptions of the heart. Parakeet enchants and enthralls.”—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

"Self-assured, strange, and winning . . . in the bright, prismatic, and fleeting language of the internet age—Bertino traces The Bride’s ping-pong journey in and out of the lives . . . [of] many memorable characters . . . The book’s linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino’s images demand a lot of the reader, but the relatability of The Bride’s honest and earnest attempts to do her best with the uncooperative life she has been given resonate on a deep, perhaps even universal, frequency. A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered from humdrum reality . . . Bertino playfully, precisely builds a big world in these pages, somehow making the case that there's too much love, pain, and magic to ever fit in one story, and fitting it in all the same."—Booklist (starred review)

"Bertino skillfully weaves together reality and flights of fancy as she tackles a wide variety of issues women face and the different ways to navigate these issues. An amusing yet instructive work about how personal perspective can change everything; highly recommended."—Joanna Burkhardt, Library Journal (starred review)

“Bertino impresses with this dreamlike, sardonic novel . . . Fans of Rivka Galchen will delight in [this] subtly fantastical tale.”—Publishers Weekly