Swans

A tender, exuberant tale of hitchhiking, lonely hearts, and queer dreaming, set during 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, and the postal workers are on strike. 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, she escapes a conversion camp and hitches north, making her way through the kindness of strangers. Then she meets Lee, who is driving a pair of swans to Ohio: with the mail stopped, everyone has to be their own mail carrier, criss-crossing the Midwest to deliver or retrieve what they would have otherwise dropped in the post—a baby gift, a pension check, a crate of baby 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, crafting a happy queer love story, even as their own begins. But road trips are never without detours, unexpected passengers, and mechanical failures. Sibby and Lee meet a stranger at a motel who needs a ride north, and 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 not 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.