Pelican Girls

Stunning, moving, and remarkable. Pelican Girls is more than a novel, it's an act of advocacy for human rights and for historical acknowledgment. Julia Malye has found a rich and compelling voice, unique to those who are experts in navigating between languages and cultures

A richly layered multi-character narrative of a long-overlooked period in history... Haunting, heartbreaking, and harrowing, Malye's story is one of survival and perseverance; it is a look into the lives of women who've had everything taken from them, but still manage to go on

Pelican Girls is a marvellous achievement, an immersive and moving novel, as beautifully written as it is impeccably researched. I haven't been this swept away by a piece of historical fiction since Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet

A feat of sublime imagination, every page a wonder. Malye has written an unforgettably rich and sensual novel - a triumph

This book fascinates me. It's moving in every way: a celebration of complicity and love among women . . . It has everything in it: a great story, landscapes, atmosphere, depth and a finely wrought prose. It makes you feel that you are reading one of those literary classics that make you believe in contemporary fiction again - told with spark and excitement, and with the freshness only a young writer can give

This richly imagined historical saga tells the story of three women, discarded by French society, who have little choice but to make new lives in a country thousands of miles away, married to men they barely know. As their lives intertwine again and again, Malye paints a vivid portrait of displacement and resilience, even as she lays bare the compromises her heroines must make and the ways they become complicit in the inequities of empire