Lucid Dreams

‘Searing and soulful’ NADIA OWUSU

‘Utterly singular’ AUBE REY LESCURE

A surreal and intimate novel about a disillusioned artist who is plagued by mysterious visions, from the award-winning author of Brown Girls.

I had this sense that I needed to get back to real life. Real life. I wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore.

A young writer has achieved their lifelong ambition: they have become a published author. Their debut novel has been received with acclaim and their name is recognised. And yet, as they step through the doors opened for them by that first book, they find others closing behind them: their father returns to the Philippines; their mother continually asks when they will have a baby; their husband grows ever distant. They can’t help but start to wonder why obtaining the very thing they had always dreamed of feels so much like losing another part of themselves.

As they struggle to write their second novel, they find themselves beset by strange and unsettling dreams. Enigmatic letters and sketches appear around their home, written in handwriting that isn’t theirs, and they start to see a mysterious figure haunting the periphery of their life. Soon the line between dreams and reality, ambition and aspiration, begins to blur, until one fateful event, which draws the writer and the mysterious figure into a shocking encounter.

With Andreades’ signature dazzling style and sublime prose, Lucid Dreams examines how we find purpose, the nature of change, and the courage it takes to be fully alive today.

Reviews

Praise for Lucid Dreams:

‘Exhilaratingly candid and elegant … a forceful, vivid experimental work on language and lineage, on disorientation and immigration – and, ultimately, an utterly singular coming-of-age tale’ Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

‘A searing and soulful novel about an artist learning to dream on their own terms. As heartfelt as it is audacious, Lucid Dreams poses profound questions about love, ambition, and selfhood, challenging us all to look beneath the surface of our own desires’ Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

About the author

Daphne Palasi Andreades (she/they) is an artist and educator from Queens, New York. Daphne’s innovative debut novel, Brown Girls, was hailed as “fearless” by the New York Times, and was a finalist for several prestigious awards: the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction – the largest prize for women and nonbinary writers in the world – the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the New American Voices Award. Daphne was the 2024 Sidney Harman Fiction Writer-In-Residence at The City University of New York, Baruch College. Her work has been taught to students across numerous universities and writing workshops, and has been published in over seventy countries. She earned her MFA from Columbia University. Lucid Dreams is her second novel.