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Pelican Girls

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Pelican Girls

By: Julia Malye
Narrated by: Polly Edsell
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About this listen

 'Stunning, moving, and remarkable' Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

'A celebration of complicity and love among women' Pilar Quintana, shortlisted for the National Book Award, author of The Bitch and Abyss

'I haven't been this swept away by a piece of historical fiction since Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet' Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

Paris, 1720. The Hospice of La Salpêtrière is overrun with 'difficult' women.

Halfway around the world, on the American frontier, French settlers are in want of wives. At the asylum, a list is drawn up: eighty-eight women of childbearing age to be shipped to New Orleans. Among them are Charlotte, Geneviève and Pétronille - a sharp-tongued orphan, an accused abortionist and a rumoured madwoman.

They make the voyage over the ocean, knowing nothing of the harsh and extraordinary lives that await them, or how they will come to love and betray each other time and again in this wild and beautiful land.

Bold, thrilling and startlingly intimate, PELICAN GIRLS is a powerful vision of female friendship, identity and desire, and the choices women make in their unshakeable will to survive. For readers of Barbara Kingsolver, Lauren Groff and The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li.

'A tale of female friendship unlike any I've come across before, Julia Malye's inspired-by-a-true-story Pelican Girls is as incredible a feat of research as it is a daring work of fiction' Elle's Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024©2024 Julia Malye (P)2024 Headline Publishing Group Ltd Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction
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The performance of this book was fantastic, but there was parts of the story I found hard to believe, especially the sapphic elements. The women that settled in Louisiana in the 1720s were obviously incredibly strong and resilient women and I enjoyed this fictional account of what it would have been like for them, but something about the female love story didn't ring true for me. Overall a really enjoyable listen.

I had mixed feelings about this book

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