Cygnet
A novel by Season Butler, 2019
cygnet /ˈsɪɡnɪt/ noun: a young swan.
As rising sea levels advance toward The Kid’s cliff-front home, her old-age-separatist neighbours grow less patient with her presence and her parents are nowhere to be found. Cygnet‘s teenage protagonist confronts the dilemmas of coming-of-age in a time of personal and global uncertainty; leaving her island home means risking losing her parents forever, but staying becomes less possible with each passing day. It’s a story about identity, loyalty and survival in a historical moment when our dependable structures are being undone, vanishing and evolving faster than we can reckon with the old world’s loss. And sometimes it’s funny…
Praise for Cygnet
‘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
‘An imaginative, atmospheric and original novel that lingers in the memory long after reading.‘ – Bernadine Evaristo
‘A sad, funny, highly original novel.‘
– Blake Morrison
’Cygnet is a beautiful book, a meander through the fluid anxiety of youth, an observation of fixed imperfections of age, and a longing search for compassion on the journey between.’
— Uzodinma Iweala
‘Season Butler is an extraordinary writer. Like Colson Whitehead, her work is fearless in its inventiveness.’
– Julia Bell
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I think most people have some part of their neighbourhood where they never go – an uninspiring park, a corner where men sit and make noise when you walk by, the yard where a dog barks and lunges and flings ropes of froth from its gums, the street where the cars go slow and stop without really parking, and the transactions are quick and furtive. For me, that part of the neighbourhood is the sea. I leave it alone and it leaves me alone. Except that, lately, it doesn’t.
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