In Claudia Dey’s Daughter, a woman long caught in her father’s web strives to make a life – and art – of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean – playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights – painfully, parasitically – in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss – one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements – can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.

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BE CURIOUSER

• In Claudia Dey’s novel Daughter, Mona’s adulterous father claims her as his sole confidante, with dire consequences – The New York Times
• Claudia Dey’s latest novel seeks to disrupt the way literary parental relationships are seen – The Globe and Mail
• “The More Sheared a Line, the More Life It Can Hold”: An Interview with Claudia Dey – Fawn Parker, Hazlitt
• Claudia Dey’s new novel Daughter, out this fall, explores despair and father-daughter relationships – CBC
• Daughter Moodboard – Claudia Dey, Pinterest
• Daughter Playlist – Claudia Dey, Spotify
• Mothers as Makers of Death – Claudia Dey, The Paris Review