About Claudia Dey

CLAUDIA DEY's most recent novel, Daughter, was an instant national bestseller, named a New York Times Fall Fiction pick, an Elle Magazine Book of the Year, and a Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of Heartbreaker, a Northern Lit and Trillium Book Award finalist, currently being adapted for television. Her plays have been produced internationally, and nominated for the Governor General’s, Dora and Trillium Book Awards. Dey has worked as a film actress, a guest artist at the National Theatre School, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Her fiction, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review ("Mothers As Makers of Death"), McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Vogue, Hazlitt, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Daughter (2023)

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, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, 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 cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights--painfully, parasitically--in his 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.