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  • Cygnet

  • 'A clear-sighted, poignant rumination on loneliness, love, the melancholy of age'
  • By: Season Butler
  • Narrated by: Ayesha Antoine
  • Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)
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Cygnet cover art

Cygnet

By: Season Butler
Narrated by: Ayesha Antoine
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Summary

The Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back months ago, and now their 17-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island. 

Swan isn't just any island; it is home to an eccentric old age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland for a haven which is rapidly sinking into the ocean. The Kid's arrival threatens to burst the idyllic bubble that the elderly residents have so carefully constructed - an unwelcome reminder of the life they left behind and one they want rid of. 

Cygnet is the story of a young woman battling against the thrashing waves of loneliness and depression and how she learns to find hope, laughter and her own voice in a world that's crumbling around her.

©2019 Season Butler (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

"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)

"A sad, funny, highly original novel. Not since Holden Caulfield have I been so captivated by a first-person voice as the one Season Butler creates in Cygnet." (Blake Morrison, author of Things My Mother Never Told Me)

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best book I have read this year

I loved this book. Such a clever premise and beautiful written. Funny and heartbreaking

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