Yiyin Li’s ‘The Book of Goose’ among PEN/Faulkner finalists

By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Yiyun Li’s novel about the friendship of two girls in post-World War II France, “The Book of Goose,” and Dionne Irving’s “The Islands,” a story collection set everywhere from London to New Jersey, are among the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The other three nominees announced Tuesday by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation are all debut works. They are Laura Warrell’s polyphonic novel “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm”; Jonathan Escoffery’s stories of a Jamaican immigrant family, “If I Survive You”; and Kathryn Harlan’s sometimes fantastical stories of women in a world imperiled by climate change, “Fruiting Bodies.”