Orchid & the Wasp

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Description

The daughter of a cold, self-interested investment banker and a once formidable conductor, Gael is both bloody minded and contemptuous of those that exploit the weak a sentiment engendered by her adolescence spent looking out for her vulnerable younger brother Guthrie in depressed post-crash Dublin. When her parents separate, Gael sets out into a world being remade in the image of greed and, moving by her wit and her singlemindedness, cuts a swathe through the leather-lined, coke-dusted social clubs of London, the New York gallery scene and birth-throes of the Occupy movement. A modern-day bildungsroman, Orchid & the Wasp is a novel that chews through sexuality, class and contemporary politics and that crackles with the joyful fury and anarchic gall of writers such as Nell Zink and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Reviews

Orchid & the Wasp is a gorgeous novel told in an onrush of wit and ferocity. Art-forging, smack-talking, long-distance-running Gael Foess, three times smarter than everyone around her, proves to be an unforgettable heroine, and her journey will rattle your most basic assumptions about money, ambition, and the nature of love. Caoilinn Hughes is a massive talent. * Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author *
Gael, the young heroine of Orchid & the Wasp, is a magnificent and assured creation, breathtakingly smart, never self-pitying, impossible for others to manage, my favorite discovery this year. Hughes's characters are rare, like no one you've read before. This is an entirely original novel, dazzling and beautiful, disturbingly cold and insistent. * David Vann, author of Legend of a Suicide *

Author Bio

Caoilinn Hughes poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Best British Poetry and Poetry Ireland. Her writing has also appeared in The Rumpus and Tin House, and shes been a recipient of an Irish Arts Council Literary Bursary. She divides her time between her native Ireland and Holland.