His Daughter

From an electrifying new voice in literary fiction comes a tense, unflinching novel about love, stepmotherhood, and the limits of chosen family.

Livia, a forty-year-old Italian translator living in New York City, never wanted children – so when she falls in love with Arno and is drawn into the life of his five-year-old daughter, Emma, she resolves to try, despite her misgivings.

But, as years pass and tensions deepen, what begins as reluctance curdles into something far more fraught as Emma continually resists Livia, and Livia begins to question her own capacity for care and love.

Spanning over a decade, His Daughter traces the slow unravelling of a family bound together by choice and strained by resentment, asking whether love can survive in the face of jealousy and pushes each character to their absolute limit.