Wild Geese

Irish novelist Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel is an intimate sprawl of memory, migration, and queer desire-charting the messy layers of love and loss that constitute a life.

Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she’s overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen.

Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants.

But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she’d left behind. Over the course of a weekend, their romance rekindles into something sweet and radically unfamiliar as Grace helps Phoebe navigate the jagged edges of nostalgia and hope.

Written with wit and warmth, Wild Geese is a tale of dislocations and relocations, encounters, and accidents: a novel of past lives, messy feelings, and the desire to start afresh.

What others are saying:

“Wild Geese is a sensitive, thoughtful novel about personal identity, the loss of illusions, and growth into love and wholeness.” —Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Bittersweet and meandering in the best way, this is fiction worth lingering over.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Wild Geese is proof that Soula is the most exciting new voice in Irish writing.” —i-D

“A lyrical and bittersweet meditation on memory and trans identity set over the course of one weekend… This is one to savor.” —Publishers Weekly

“A trans Before Sunset set in Copenhagen? Yes, please!” —Electric Literature

“A tale of migrating like the majestic honking birds in the sky.” —Independent Book Review