*INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER* *Finalist for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction* *A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year*
Named a Most Anticipated Book at The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Elle Magazine, Literary Hub, The Millions, and the CBC.
“[A] darkly glittering tale. We are inside a howl.” —The New York Times Book Review
A searing and hypnotic tour de force about a woman, long caught in her charismatic father's web, who strives to make a life—and art—of her own.
To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.
So says Mona Dean--playwright, actress and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights--painfully, parasitically--in his attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.
Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.
Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humour. A novel as volatile and far-reaching as its title, Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create and to break free.
CLAUDIA DEY's most recent novel, Daughter, was an instant national bestseller, named a New York Times Fall Fiction pick, an Elle Magazine Book of the Year, and a Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of Heartbreaker, a Northern Lit and Trillium Book Award finalist, currently being adapted for television. Her plays have been produced internationally, and nominated for the Governor General’s, Dora and Trillium Book Awards. Dey has worked as a film actress, a guest artist at the National Theatre School, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Her fiction, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review ("Mothers As Makers of Death"), McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Vogue, Hazlitt, The Believer, and elsewhere.
"Stunning. . .[Claudia Dey] balances feverish melodrama with chilled and precise prose. . . . In Daughter, Mona wages her own war, over her power as a writer, and as a woman. This beautiful and piercing novel is her hard-won victory." —Meg Howrey, The New York Times Book Review
“Daughter is a literary stick of dynamite–incendiary and exposing painful truths about art, family, and systemic inequities. Claudia Dey writes about the fraught relationship between a woman and her novelist father, as she tries to build her own creative career in his shadow. Both a study of intimate manipulations and the trope of the male genius, Daughter is a novel that ricochets between uncomfortable emotions and social constructs with fearlessness and intent.” —2024 Carol Shields Prize jury citation
"Despite its cool interiority and absence of direct dialogue, Daughter has the feel of an ensemble piece where minimal backdrops highlight the emotionally astute drama unfolding against them." —Emily Donaldson, The Globe and Mail
"An unflinching yet tender look into the dark heart of family-inflicted trauma, and the love that persists in spite of betrayal. . .Daughter is a raw, robust portrait of a young woman’s loss—and the courage she needs to live with it." —Elle
“[A] wry, furious new novel . . . Dey’s fluid, feverish sentences are beautiful and unexpected."—The Walrus
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