Parakeet

Parakeet is a novel by the American writer Marie-Helene Bertino, published in 2020. It takes place in the week leading up to a wedding, and it begins with a visit from a bird.

The bride recognises the parakeet as her grandmother, partly from the cornflower blue line beneath its eyes, partly from its dubious expression and partly from the way it asks her what the Internet is. What her grandmother has come to say is that she should not get married and that she should go and find her brother.

The days that follow take the bride away from her march to the altar and into a journey that becomes more and more fragmented and unstable as it goes on. It is a family story as much as anything else, and the people she is looking for are people she has spent years avoiding.

The novel keeps returning to the questions of what memory makes of a person, how anybody can honour what has happened to them and still become who they want to be, and what is owed to the people who brought them up.