Daughter

A Novel

By: Claudia Dey

Narrated by: Ellie Moon, Kristen Thomson, Jonathon Young, Tom McCamus, Maggie Huculak, Rebecca Liddiard, Hailey Gillis, Gwenlyn Cumyn, Karen Knox

*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 humor. 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.

©2023 Claudia Dey (P)2023 Doubleday Canada

Critic reviews

"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

"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

"Daughter is a breathtaking and brilliant novel about the exquisite pain and agony that comes from loving and needing certain people in our lives to love us back, to love us better. It is also about how we are relentless animals, wild and searching, trying to get our crushed, hungry bodies into our wolf packs. I loved this beautifully written book and was profoundly moved by it, so uncompromising and so true." —MIRIAM TOEWS, author of Fight Night and Women Talking