Fen

Description

Welcome to the Fen - a landscape of dark magic and desire, conjured by a fierce new voice in British fiction. Revisit the haunting debut short story collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under. 'Full of unabashedly, refreshingly angry women... In a year that made me furious, Daisy Johnson's Fen was a howl I didn't know I needed' Celeste Ng The Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a, well, what? 'Instant classic...a bold, take-no-prisoners collection situated somewhere between Angela Carter and Deborah Levy' Jeff VanderMeer

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen was unanimously beloved... firmly situating her among the UK's most exciting new voices. -- Marta Bausells * Elle * Just finished rereading Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen. Just as powerful and beautiful and dark and strange as the first time. One of my favourite books of all time. -- Jeff Vandermeer Johnson's heady broth of folklore, female sexuality and fenland landscape reads like a mix of Graham Swift and Angela Carter... For atmosphere, originality and plain chutzpah, this is an impressive first collection. -- Sarah Crown * Guardian * Poetic, risky... Johnson's slippery and sensual stories-cum-chapters have an amphibious elemental quality and a contemporary provincial witchiness of their own. -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times * There is big, dangerous vitality herein - this book marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent. -- Kevin Barry Reading the stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room slowly, but very surely, filling up with water. You think: this can't be happening. Meanwhile, hold your breath against the certainty it surely is. -- Cynan Jones, author of The Dig