Daphne
Will be published approx. on 8. February 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-1-84708-835-2 (ISBN)
Description
Daphne suffers from a rare medical condition; her body shuts down when she feels strong emotions. As a result she has built strong walls between herself and the world, avoiding passion, anger, disappointment and surprise. But when she meets Ollie, who seems to see through her armour, who seems to want to know the real Daphne, her carefully built defences begin to crumble.
In this gripping and tender modern myth, Will Boast explores the unexamined assumptions we make about our bodies and our relationships through the prism of a soulful contemporary love story.
In this gripping and tender modern myth, Will Boast explores the unexamined assumptions we make about our bodies and our relationships through the prism of a soulful contemporary love story.
Reviews / Votes
Boast's real forte is the evocation of emotion... Daphne is sleek and artful, it is also quite touching -- Sam Kitchener * Literary Review * Boast's novel is wry and witty, tender and weird... [It] expands beyond easy romance into a political exploration of the necessity of empathy, and the toll empathy can take. Daphne is at once a fable and a beautifully engaged reflection on love. It is strange and heart-warming in equal measure -- Sean Hewitt * Irish Times * This engaging debut novel set in San Francisco is a modern retelling of the Daphne and Apollo myth... it makes us coolly contemplate how and why we feel -- Anita Sethi * Guardian * Set in the era of Occupy Wall Street, in a San Francisco where rich techies coexist with the homeless and addicted, Daphne is a clever consideration of the place of feeling in both public and private life... Daphne gets away with using illness as a metaphor to illuminate the emotional management we all perform daily - while still following the eternally gratifying arc of the romance novel -- Annalisa Quinn * Financial Times * Thought-provoking... Written in a modishly clipped style that captures Daphne's repression, Boast memorably tests how far people will go to seal themselves off from physical and emotional pain -- Leaf Arbuthnot * Sunday Times * A profoundly modern fable that is simultaneously tragic and inspiring...deeply immersive, [a] sensory experience' -- Tess Davidson * TLS *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
277 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84708-835-2 (9781847088352)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
New editions
Person
Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His short story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for a California Book Award. He is the author of Epilogue, a memoir (2014). His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices and the New York Times, among other publications. He has been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the UK.