Helen Bain’s debut novel, The Daffodil Days (Scribner 2026), would have been on my Booker Longlist predictions had I read it earlier. (It would likely have replaced A Beautiful Loan.) And while it’s too late for me to change those predictions, I will stand ten toes down behind this novel.
Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology is a work that has stuck with me for years, and Bain’s debut seemed to echo with it. Instead of free verse poems narrating the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, Bain gives us short stories of various residents who interacted with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes during the last year of her life. It’s a small town, and the stories bleed into each other, recast from the point of view of a different villager. My favorite is likely “The Jaeger Suit,” in which Jenny, a young shopgirl, serves Sylvia when she comes into Kestrels for a dress. I also thoroughly enjoyed the doctor’s story and the horseback riding instructor. And the beekeeper. The individual stories aren’t so much about Sylvia as about the people who orbited around her. And the bells. The church bells or the clangers feature heavily throughout the collection.
Daffodil Days is well done, and the voices are distinct while still cohesive to the village. The bells, colors, daffodils, Sylvia… there are so many threads binding this work, and I really enjoyed it.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 