Swans (A Novel)

A tender, madcap tale of hitchhiking, lonely hearts, queer dreaming, and the great postal workers’ strike of 1970, Swans is the captivating second novel by the award-winning author of Agatha of Little Neon.

It is March 1970. Armed with a fold-up knife, a sock full of nickels, and a letter to the woman she loves, Sibby is on the run. An avid lonely-hearts correspondent who has escaped from a conversion camp, she is traveling the highways through the kindness of strangers. Then she meets Lee, who is driving a pair of swans to Ohio. Meanwhile, postal workers across the country are on strike. Everyone has to be their own mail carrier, crisscrossing the Midwest to deliver or retrieve what they would have otherwise dropped in the post: a baby gift, a pension check, a pair of chicks, a love letter. When a gas station clerk asks Sibby and Lee to take an important message to a woman in another county, they begin to tell each other stories about the correspondents, a happy queer love story, even as their own begins. But road trips are never without detours, unexpected passengers, and mechanical failures. When Sibby and Lee meet a stranger at a motel who needs a ride north, they find themselves drawn into a whole new set of adventures that complicate their mission and force them to confront their feelings and choices. Are they scabs for delivering the letter? Can a draft card be canceled? How do we know if a story is ours to tell? And if an identity is made up, is it no longer real?

Tender, funny, and insightful, Claire Luchette’s Swans is a story of self-invention, disarming connection, little-known history, winding roads, and rewriting the future.