Daphne | Granta

  • Published: 03/01/2019
  • ISBN: 9781783781515
  • 129x20mm
  • 288 pages

Daphne

Will Boast

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.

A charming romance that readers can't help but emphasise with

Alastair Mabbot, Hearld

The Author

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. 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.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Epilogue

Will Boast

When Will Boast’s father dies he is alone in the world: an American with distant English roots, orphaned, and derailed by grief. Everything he thought he knew about his parents unravels when he discovers he has two half-brothers living in England. In exquisite prose Will Boast sets about piecing together a new sense of himself, attempting as he does to understand, forgive and heal the mistakes of his father’s past.

Will Boast on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

Black Car

Will Boast

‘It got into you. How many scrapes had he seen? How many wrecks?’ New fiction from Will Boast.

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Agony and Ecstasy of Escape

Will Boast

Will Boast on how Bernini's Apollo and Daphne helped him write his latest novel

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Back Way and the Way Back

Will Boast

Despite emerging from two decades of misrule under Yahya Jammeh, many Gambians still aspire to go ‘the back way’ into Europe.