Daisy Lafarge

A sharp, timely debut about a young woman’s toxic relationship with an older man and her battle to free herself from the suffocating expectation to be “good” When personal scandal forces her to leave Paris, Frances, a young British graduate student, travels to southern France one summer to volunteer on a farm. Almost as soon as she arrives, she is pulled into a relationship with the farm’s enigmatic owner, Paul, a well-traveled older artist. Alone in a foreign country, drawn into his orbit, and eventually tangled up in his sheets, Frances starts to lose herself in Paul’s easy, experienced charm. Yet over the course of three intense weeks, as she discovers more about Paul and the people surrounding him, she realizes that she’s caught in an emotional battle of wills that threatens to stifle her voice and crush her autonomy. Coming to terms with what’s happening to her and wresting control from an older man with dark secrets of his own are at the heart of this compelling, unsettling novel. By turns the story of how a modern woman finds the inner strength to regain her sense of self and a fascinating exploration of the power dynamics between men and women, Paul is a deeply human novel that holds a mirror up to many of the issues that people confront today.

A Novel

Paul

The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Lovebug

"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.

Life Without Air

We have never been more aware of the air we breathe. Air is intimate, yet it connects us all: every outbreath will go around the world in a fortnight. And air is alive, ever shifting, an invisible world full of mystery. From the classical theory of elements to fossilised bacteria on Orkney, by way of airborne microplastics and South London buses, Daisy Lafarge takes us on a journey to reimagine our relationship with the natural world through the air we breathe. Rather than something we passively receive and depend on, Airs, Species, Commons explores how all forms of life work together to create and maintain the air as a multispecies commons. The instantaneous drop in air pollution and palpable change in air quality during the first wave of lockdowns in Spring 2020 offered us a hopeful, tentative glimpse of what a protected air commons might begin to feel like.

Daisy Lafarge

About

Books

Join the club