Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558610132
Publication Date: 09-12-2023

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.

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction

“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

“In gorgeous, poignant prose, Soula Emmanuel’s phenomenal debut brings us the tangled life of Phoebe as she receives an unexpected visit from an ex-girlfriend, stirring ghosts from the past and hauntings of the present. Intimate and lit up from the inside, Wild Geese moves through a cosmology of intimacies with incredible preciseness, humor, and lyricism. A terrific read that looks at a trans experience unflinchingly, distilling the mundane life of love and loss, Wild Geese is sassy, cataclysmic, and full of life.” —Julián Delgado Lopera, author of Fiebre Tropical: A Novel

“Replete with remarkable turns of phrase that will make you giggle and gasp, Soula Emmanuel’s prose crackles with detail and sparkles with delight. Wild Geese cuts to the pulsing, messy heart of the trans-nomadic experience.” —Bishakh Som, author of Apsara Engine

“In this quietly dazzling story of departure and return, Soula Emmanuel’s Phoebe swiftly wins our hearts with her candor and wit. Never before has a character so luminously reckoned with the joys and terrors of being known. A gorgeous and heartening read.” —Megan Milks, author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body

“I am so here for this dreamlike reconciliation between ex-lovers thrown together for a rich and fleeting weekend of museum snark, strap-on pranks, and sumptuous European breakfasts. I am here for this investigation of different womanhoods, trans and cis, and for this poetic look back at the terra incognita of our pretranssexual twenties. And I am here for this conjuration of real, messy friendship and its spaces of complicated trust. I am here for Wild Geese.” —Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun

“Wild Geese is a virtuosic miniature painted with a single-hair brush under a magnifying glass, crammed implausibly full of lyricism, jokes, passionate cries, questionable aphorisms, and savagely well-observed dialogue. The novel is also doing something really unusual: in a political context of rising transphobia, and amid a trans cultural scene that reacts with increasing separatism, it takes frighteningly seriously the question of the relations between trans and cis women, both in our shared womanhood, and through our very real differences. In vindicating the possibility that we might love and help each other, despite everything, Wild Geese attains a hard-won, triumphant generosity.” —Cat Fitzpatrick, author of The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme