Fen

Book cover of Fen: Stories

Book description

Winner of the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Daisy Johnson's Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Fen as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Clare Morgan

Author

These short stories lure you in to a world of fantastical distortions and mythical resonances, which make you look differently at women’s lives.

A young girl with an eating disorder turns into an eel; a group of female friends go hunting for male conquests whom they kill and eat to satisfy their appetites. In a world of anarchic desires and obtuse relationships, strange and inexplicable metamorphoses take place. Violence bridges the gap between human and animal, between desire and carnal action.

In candid language not for the faint-hearted, this book probes the potentially dark recesses of the female psyche against…

From Clare's list on love, desire and loneliness in women’s lives, without flinching.

Erin Slaughter

Author

Fen is another book I picked up early in my writing career, and has made me a lifelong Daisy Johnson fan.

This is a collection of linked stories set in one small English town, where a harem of vampires lure their prey with dating apps, a narrator tries to save her sister from her anorexia transforming her into an eel, and a fox’s consciousness bleeds together with that of its hunters.

From Erin's list on magical short story collections written by women.