Paul | Granta

  • Published: 07/07/2022
  • ISBN: 9781783787883
  • Granta Books
  • 336 pages

Paul

Daisy Lafarge

Frances is a young graduate student spending a summer volunteering in rural France, in the hope that tending vegetables and harvesting honey will distract her from a scandal that drove her out of Paris, her research unfinished and her sense of self unmoored.

At the eco-farm Noa Noa, named for his adventures in Tahiti, she comes under the influence of its charismatic and domineering owner, Paul. As his hold over her tightens and her plans come unstuck, she finds herself entangled in a strange, uneven relationship. On a fraught road trip across the South of France, both are forced to reckon with uncomfortable truths.

A compelling and perturbing story of power, passivity and the cage of being ‘good’, Paul introduces a novelist of extraordinary perspicacity and lyricism.

I cherished this moreish, dreamy, hazy novel... I know I will return many times to inhabit the world Lafarge has written so exquisitely

Megan Nolan

Crisp and elegant, the sentences both vivid and precise... With an intelligence lightly worn, this is an immersive, maddening, unsettling read

Sean Hewitt, Irish Times

Daisy Lafarge's debut is a force to be reckoned with: all sinewy prose and sharp compulsion, with deep insight about the choreography of power and its eerie, unsettling flavor. As she pulls on the loose threads of the male artist's mythos, more unravels than mere secrets

Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

The Author

Daisy Lafarge was born in Hastings and studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta Books, 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Paul, the winner of a Betty Trask Award, is her debut novel.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Life Without Air

Daisy Lafarge

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020

“Whip-smart, sonically gorgeous” – Rae Armantrout, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Versed

When Louis Pasteur observed the process of fermentation, he noted that, while most organisms perished from lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive as ‘life without air’. In this capricious, dreamlike collection, characters and scenes traverse states of airlessness, from suffocating relationships and institutions, to toxic environments and ecstatic asphyxiations.

Both compassionate and ecologically nuanced, this innovative collection bridges poetry and prose to interrogate the conditions necessary for survival.

Daisy Lafarge on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet

Daisy Lafarge

‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’

Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

Interview

Daisy Lafarge

‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.

Granta Books Writing | The Online Edition

Fossil Dinner

Daisy Lafarge

‘The poor dish looks just like me.’