The Daffodil Days

Beautiful, affecting and deeply impressive, this is an ingeniously constructed novel, told slant. I loved it. * Louise Kennedy, author of TRESPASSES * An exceptional novel, with shades of Hilary Mantel. Helen Bain takes the familiar and makes it utterly new. I loved it. I miss it * Meg Mason, author of SORROW AND BLISS * A luminous, deeply researched debut, The Daffodil Days reimagines Sylvia Plath's Court Green period through a chorus of village voices – letting the known story fall away until what remains feels bracingly human and close. Helen Bain's prose is exact and alive, and the novel builds with a quietly devastating inexorable force you can't look away from * Paula McLain, author of THE PARIS WIFE * A pointillistic, unsentimental, and intimate portrait of Sylvia Plath through the eyes of those whose lives she brushed up against in rural Devon. Bain renders Plath’s humor, wit, resilience, and heartbreak from new angles, at once strange and familiar. Not a word is out of place. Full of understated lyricism and a deep respect for Plath and her world, The Daffodil Days is an exquisite and spellbinding debut * Heather Clark, author of Red Comet * Helen Bain has produced something quietly miraculous. The Daffodil Days brings the characters in a rural community to life in a way that evokes Andrew Miller’s A Land in Winter ... the depth of Bain’s meticulous, loving research is never obtrusive. It’s a captivating debut: a compassionate, perceptive and truly wonderful book * Miranda Seymour * You would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary -- Melissa Harrison * Guardian * Told through shifting viewpoints, this fictionalised account of the period leading up to Plath’s tragic death is utterly compelling * i paper * Stunning * Good Housekeeping * A beautifully achieved story of daily and extraordinary life * Sainsbury's * A love letter to Dartmoor, and to the writer who lived there, Bain’s is a smart debut that sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic creatives * The Bookseller * Bain’s style is both old-fashioned and radical … A cleverly quiet, unassuming novel about two people who were anything but * Daily Mail * I adored this novel. It’s beautifully written, intricately plotted, wears the precision of its research lightly, and is exquisitely moving. A very special book * Lucy Caldwell *