Wild Geese Author : Soula Emmanuel ISBN-13 : 978-1804440162 Publisher : Footnote Press Guideline Price : £ 9.99 Soula Emmanuel’s excellent debut Wild Geese opens with an ordinary afternoon in the life of Phoebe Forde, a young Irish trans woman living in Copenhagen. She’s doing a PhD studying urban water and gender in sub-Saharan Africa but finds herself increasingly tired of the field.
“Most people come to the faculty because they want to save the world,” she says. “I came to save myself.” She is almost three years into her gender transition (“Having tried one life for ten thousand days, I couldn’t be said to have quit prematurely”), and lives a quiet, careful existence with her dog, Dolly.
She has assembled this new life from components, but cautiously so, as if assembling a flatpack bookcase by laying out the pieces correctly, but never actually screwing the unit together. This solitude is upended when Phoebe’s first love Grace appears unexpectedly at her door. They met in Ireland when Phoebe was 22, their eight months together fitting into the chronology of Phoebe’s life, “like a respectable existence punctuated by a short prison stay”.
Phoebe remembered Grace as fiery and determined: “She had history, where I just had time.” Yet it becomes clear that Grace’s brash confidence has begun to seep away. [ The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson: Splendid and compulsively readable despite one weakness ] Grace works for an organisation offer.
