The Pigeon

By Patrick Suskind, John E. Woods (translator),

Book cover of The Pigeon

Book description

Jonathan Noel, bank security guard, has spent 30 years protecting himself from people and events. But an encounter with a glaring pigeon upsets his ordered life and flings him into a state of fear and insecurity. From the author of the international bestselling Perfume.

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Pigeon as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I read this book for the third time in 2023, and it seems to get better at every reading... Or more likely, I get to see how I’ve changed.

It’s a simple, mostly narrative, 115-page beautifully written story about a man whose rigidly controlled life living in a small room and working as a bank security guard is completely derailed by the appearance of a pigeon where a pigeon should not be.

It’s in my list of favorites for the same reason the first two books are: it sticks with me as a real-lived experience—in this case, of going from…

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