Books published by Daunt Books

Bento Santiago is madly in love with his neighbour, Capitu. He even breaks a promise his devout mother made to God - that he become a priest - in order to marry her. But, once wed, Bento becomes increasingly convinced that Capitu is having a torrid affair, that his son is not his own, and that his best friend has cuckolded him. What follows is a rich and sardonic narrative, as Bento attempts to discern his son's paternity. Are his suspicions actually based in reality or have his obsessive ruminations given way to deceptive illusions? Originally published in Brazil in 1900, Dom Casmurro is widely considered Machado de Assis's greatest work and a classic of Brazilian realist literature. It is a delightful and hilarious novel - told by an entertainingly unreliable narrator - about the powers of jealousy and the deceitful persuasiveness of a mind in the grip of paranoia. 'If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.' - Salman Rushdie 'The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America.' - Susan Sontag 'Machado de Assis is a great ironist, a tragic comedian. In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh.' - Philip Roth 'Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James.' - New York Times Book Review

Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride - fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust - but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers on the street and say, 'This is my daughter. She hates me'. Weaving between their tempestuous present-day jaunts and the author's memories of the past, Gornick traces her lifelong struggle for independence from her mother - from growing up in a blue-collar tenement house in the Bronx in the 1940s, to newlywed grad student, to established journalist - only to discover the many ways in which she is (and always has been) her mother's daughter. Fierce Attachments is a searingly honest and intimate memoir about coming of age in a big city, and the perpetual bonds that keep us forever linked to our family. 'Admired, rightly, as "e;timeless"e; and "e;classic"e; . . . Fierce Attachments demands honour as the work of a breathtaking technician.' - Jonathan Lethem 'A fine, unflinchingly honest book . . . The story of an abiding, difficult love, full of grace and fire.' - New York Times 'Brimming with life . . . Fierce Attachments is a work of emotional cartography, charting influences and mapping out a proximate territory of the Self.' - Los Angeles Times 'One hesitates to traffic in such stock reviewer's adjectives as "e;brilliant"e;, "e;an American classic"e;, but there are only so many words with which to say how very good this book is.' - Washington Post

The first collection of stories from the author of Real Life, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and winner of the Foyles Fiction Book Of The YearIn the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, a young man tentatively engages with the world again. Recently discharged from hospital, Lionel meets two dance students at a party. Charles and Sophie's relationship is difficult to read but Lionel is drawn to them both. As he navigates their sexually fraught encounters he is forced to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness - and to consider his return to life. Elsewhere, a little girl runs wild to the consternation of her childminder; unspoken frictions among a group of teenagers come to a vicious head on a winter night; and a woman dreads a first date only to find that something has cracked open.What connects these stories is the tension between the surface of things and the intensity of our inner worlds. With exquisite empathy, Brandon Taylor shows that though violence hovers at the edge of many encounters, so too does tenderness and love.

Take a stroll through London with Virginia Woolf as your guide in this beautifully illustrated book. Virginia Woolf relished any opportunity for a stroll around London. She found great pleasure in observing the city and its people - noticing the subtle details that others often miss. In this collection of stunning essays, Woolf gives us an intimate tour of her beloved hometown. We venture through unfamiliar pockets of London and revisit its most famous landmarks; we smell the salty air of the East End docks and hear the echoing sounds inside the Houses of Parliament; Woolf transports us to the bustle of Oxford Street and the more peaceful moments on Hampstead Heath. Originally published bi-monthly in 1931 by Good Housekeeping, the essays in The London Scene exhibit Virginia Woolf at the height of her literary powers and present an unparalleled and meditative portrait of an extraordinary metropolis - capturing the London of the 1930s and also the eternal city we recognise today. 'While it might not list the hottest restaurants and the newest boutique hotels, The London Scene gives us an amalgam of intelligence and beauty that few, if any, guidebooks provide.' - Francine Prose '1930s London comes alive in these six evocative essays . . . a discerning, affectionate tour of her beloved city.' - Washington Post

'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries aneccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism - and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief.At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.

It had been Graham Greene's ideato explore tropical West Africa. The map of Liberia was virtually blank,the interior marked 'cannibals'. It was a far cry from the literary London of 1935,and the result of the 350-mile trek was the masterclass in travel writing that is Journey Without Maps. But the gifted author was not travelling alone. His cousin Barbara had, over perhaps a little too much champagne, rashlyagreed to go with him. Unbeknown to him, she also took up pen and paper on their long and arduous journey.Too Late to Turn Back is the amusing, mock-heroic and richly evocative adventure of a young woman who set out from the world of Saki and the Savoy Grill armed only with a cheery stoicism and an eye for an anecdote. From her exasperation at her cousin's refusal to pull his socks up to her concern over his alarmingly close scrape with death, from her yearning for smoked salmon to the missionary who kept a pet cobra, what emerges is a surprisingly refreshing andcharming travelogue of comic misadventure, fizzing with good.

It is the day of her younger brother's wedding and our narrator is struggling to compose her toast. She was nine years old when she travelled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother Danny, and while their childhood in California was a happy one, when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she didn't expect. How to put words to their love?What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an excavation of their years growing up. Invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny's case file, her narration is also a confession of sorts: to the parts of her life that she has kept from Danny, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding tick down, she uncovers the words that can't and won't be said aloud.In Immediate Family, a fiercely tender debut novel, one luminous with love, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you've ever read before.Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic - and often idiosyncratic - value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things.The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep - and, arguably, hoard - tells the story of contemporary Poland.Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her formidable temperament, her weakness for consumer goods, all accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of a woman and, ultimately, her country. Things I Didn't Throw Out is an intimate, unconventional and very funny memoir about everything we leave behind.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces-climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism-inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, high up in her office on the thirteenth floor, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She knows nothing of Celan, still less of her new neighbours or colleagues.She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. Like everywhere, the abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia. The weather is deteriorating, the ordinary lives of women are in peril, and an unexplained curfew has been imposed.But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living - until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them. Reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley, The Coming Bad Days is a penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty. It announces the arrival of a startling new voice in fiction: intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.'Raw, dazzling and bracingly new. A vividly original novel about the fractured difficulty of living.' - Rebecca Tamas, author of Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman

'Bear,' she cried. 'I love you. Pull my head off.'Lou is a shy and diligent librarian at the local Heritage Institute. She lives a mole-like existence, buried among maps and manuscripts in her dusty basement office. With nothing and no one to go home to, she resigns herself to passionless sex on her desk with the Institute's Director.When she is summoned to a remote island to inventory the house and estate of the late Colonel Jocelyn Cary, she takes it as an opportunity to head north and get out of the city, hoping for an industrious summer of cataloguing.Colonel Cary left many possessions behind, but no one warned her about the bear. Lou soon begins to anticipate the bear's needs for food and company. But as summer blooms across the island and Lou shakes off the city, she realises the bear might satisfy some needs of her own.