Daunt Books buys 'unsettling' first novel from Sarah Bernstein

Daunt Books Publishing has acquired debut novel The Coming Bad Days by poet and academic Sarah Bernstein. Publisher Željka Marošević acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates.

The book, said to be reminiscent of Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley, is described as "a penetrating interior portrait of feminine negation and cruelty". The synopsis reads: "After leaving the man with whom she’d been living, an unnamed protagonist in an unnamed university city is working unspectacularly on the poet Paul Celan. The abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia; the weather has been deteriorating and outside her office window she can hear police helicopters circling, looking for the women who have been disappearing. She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. But when she meets Clara – a woman who is exactly her opposite – her plans begin to unravel."

Marošević said: "I was immediately taken in by this icy and unsettling novel that asks what happens to a woman when she refuses to do what is expected of her. Bernstein’s writing is razor sharp and uncompromising, full of wit and unexpected beauty as she explores female friendship and enmity as well as the changing weather, university strikes, and how political upheaval infects our private lives."

Bernstein herself described The Coming Bad Days as a "strange book, which is about solitude and desire, institutions and people, reading and the imagination."

Bernstein is from Montreal and lives in Scotland where she teaches at Edinburgh University. A collection of her poetry, Comes the Lightning, was published by Pedlar Press in 2015.

The Coming Bad Days will be published on the Daunt Books Originals list in spring 2021.