Cygnet: A Novel

Written by Season Butler

Narrated by Ayesha Antoine

“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 Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station

An utterly original coming-of-age tale, marked by wrenching humor and staggering charisma, about a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.

“It’s too hot for most of the clothes I packed to come here, when I thought this would only be for a week or two. My mother kissed me with those purple-brown lips of hers and said, we’ll be back, hold tight.”

Seventeen-year-old Kid doesn’t know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now, Lolly is dead and Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents, and with no other relatives to turn to, Kid works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past—digitally retouching family photos and movies—to earn enough money to survive.

Surrounded by the vast ocean, Kid’s temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of elderly separatists who left behind the youth-obsessed mainland—”the Bad Place”—to create their own alternative community. These residents call themselves the Swans. Kid calls them the Wrinklies. Even as Kid tries to be good and quiet and patient, the adolescent’s presence unnerves the Swans, turning some downright hostile. They don’t care if she has nowhere to go, they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they’ve left behind and are determined to forget.

But Kid isn’t the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Swans’ very existence there. To find a way forward, the Kid must come to terms with the realities of her life and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.

Season Butler makes her literary debut with an ambitious work of bold imagination. Tough and tender, compassionate and ferocious, intelligent and provocative, Cygnet is a meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting, that explores what it means to find acceptance—of things past and those to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062891969

Season Butler

Season Butler is a writer and artist born in Washington, DC. She currently splits her time between London and Berlin. Cygnet is her first novel.

Reviews for Cygnet

[alisony-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Swan Island is a small fictional retirement island off the coast of New Hampshire. 'The Wrinklies' (as the teenage protagonist refers to them) fiercely guard the sanctity of their dream island home; those from the Bad Land (i.e. anywhere outside of the island) are only allowed onto the island one Friday in every month, when visits by relatives are tolerated and a resupply of recreational drugs is welcomed.The narrator is a 17 year old teenager who finds herself unwillingly coming-of-age in this alien environment, where her presence is accepted with strict limitations by the friendlier residents and abjectly abhorred by others. Left there 'for a few weeks' by her ill-equipped parents, the novel opens with the narrator now living alone in her late grandmother's house which is perilously close to falling off the edge of the eroding cliff face.This is a clever and unusual novel which plays with a reversal of the societal norms where it is usually the older generation who are left lonely and isolated. Tolerated but not fully accepted as part of the fabric of the island, this is a novel of loneliness and marginalisation, where the raw and remote natural beauty of the island idyll amplifies the narrator's feelings of desolation. Like any teenager she's conflicted between outwardly kicking back whilst inwardly desperately wanting to feel wanted and secure, and is terrified of leaving the island in case her parents are just about to come for her.Cygnet was one of the three debut books of the year picked out by the Sunday Times at this year's Cheltenham Festival. It's not a perfect novel - the author's greenness showed through in places (particularly towards the start of the novel) with occasional overworked prose, and I couldn't necessarily connect the narrator's voice with naturally being that of teenager. However, overall this novel engaged me much more than I'd expected it to. Its plot was fresh and highly original, and as a result it kept me hooked as I had no idea where she was taking me as a reader.To me, Season Butler is just cutting her teeth as an author, with bigger and better still to come. Although a new black voice in published fiction, she's no stranger to writing, having already carved out a career as a dramaturgist, creative writing teacher and academic. Her experience from academia was apparent - in this novel you could tell she didn't just want to tell a story but was also interested in exploring certain 'what if' scenarios and schools of thought. Her blurb states that she's interested in intersectional feminism and difference bias, and although Cygnet wasn't overtly covering those themes, her 'day job' of exploring ideas and concepts certainly added an unexpected depth to her writing.4 stars - imperfect yet enthralling nonetheless.