Canoes

About Canoes

From the author of Eastbound, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year

A colorful cast of female characters contends with UFOs, sonic waves, and the legend of Buffalo Bill in a spellbinding novella and 7 short stories about the mysteries of place and language

“The translation of any of Maylis de Kerangal’s books is a gift.” — Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker

“De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

Ricocheting off of the book’s exhilarating central novella and 7 short stories, the women we meet in Canoes are by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected.

“When did I start placing myself in the fable?” a young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband’s voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.

The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave readers forever altered.