Daddy

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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls comes an eagerly anticipated story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.

An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest.

In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one's choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline's sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.

"A thrilling new voice in American fiction." Jennifer Egan, about The Girls

"Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable--an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles.... Much of this has to do with Cline's ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do." James Wood, The New Yorker

"When I read Emma Cline I think of Mary Gaitskill's psychological acuity and of Joy Williams's sardonic gravitas. And yet something about Cline's intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own." Rachel Kushner

Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the John Leonard Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She is from Northern California.