Daddy

Stories

By: Emma Cline

Narrated by: Natasha Soudek

From the best-selling author of The Girls comes a “brilliant” (The New York Times) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.

“Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.” (Esquire)

Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Entertainment Weekly

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 10 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.

©2020 Emma Cline (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Brilliant, dark . . . Cline’s fiction is full of binaries pressing up against one another: youthful promise and life’s realities; success and failure; darkness and humor; external beauty and internal rot.”—Wall Street Journal

“Cline is an astonishingly gifted stylist, but it is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life. . . . Brilliant.”—The New York Times

“Cline’s stories constitute a riveting, timely tapestry of realizations, motivations, and desires.”—Booklist

Very slow and monotone stories

Not poorly written but more vignettes than stories. Did not live up to the hype of her other works that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Mostly interesting stories and great narration.

There were a few stories in here that I found boring but most of them I enjoyed. Also, I really loved this narrator.

BRILLIANT Writing, BRILLIANT narration

This book blew me away. The writing is pure genius, and the narration matched it. The narrator did an excellent job navigating the dynamics of the stories in a way that totally sucked me in and left me breathless and reeling. Thank you. I can’t stop thinking about it! New favorite writer and new favorite narrator in a power punch package!

Disappointing and annoying

I was expecting a collection of short stories, but there wasn't a single story in the book. It was more like a collection of story ideas. As if I were reading the first page of the first chapter of several books. There was no middle or end. I normally love short stories, but this was so annoying, I couldnt finish the book. I held out through most of it, thinking, maybe, the stories would come together and create something, but they never did. I gave up. The beginnings were well written. I think if the stories had been finished, they could have been really interesting....

Natasha Soudek should not do audio books!

Cline’s writing is sharply observed at times but the stories feel cold and lifeless – they strive for clever and knowing but ultimately miss the mark and suffer from a lack of warmth and profundity. There’s no heart here. Nor is there much of an arc or character development, the stories just end.

Most noticeably though, this audio version is almost painful to listen to, thanks to the truly TERRIBLE reading by Natasha Soudek. Someone needs to tell her that not *every single word* should be stressed, and how to pronounce words like ‘minutiae’. She reads every sentence with the exact same amount of over-emotion, making for an overly dramatic, deeply annoying listen with a tinge of valley girl. She isn't able to gauge where to slow down or speed up, where to pause, what words to emphasize, basically she can't track story. She really ruins the prose and it's almost impossible to get through this audio book as a result.