Overview

'Very strange and very funny' Guardian 'Batty and brilliant' The Times 'A full-throttle thrill' Daily Mail A CLASSIC STORY OF GIRL MEETS PLANE Linda tries her best to lead a normal life. But once a month she escapes to the airport to secretly indulge in her true passion: Linda is sexually attracted to planes, and believes it is her destiny to someday marry one by dying in a fiery crash. When the opportunity arises to hasten her romantic fate, Linda must choose between the trappings of an ordinary life and succumbing to her deepest desires. 'Truly original . . . the kind of novel that startles you into remembering fiction's potential to be simultaneously deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt' Daily Telegraph

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9781529372700

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Reviews

Folk has written something truly original here: the kind of novel that startles you into remembering fiction's potential to be simultaneously deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt . . . Sky Daddy's deadpan humour is exquisite . . . in a fiction landscape that often bends toward the familiar and marketable, Sky Daddy reminds us that the novel's real job is to stretch the imagination to its most exhilarating limits. The best fiction doesn't just mirror desire - it deranges it, making us see the world, and ourselves, afresh' -- Amber Medland * Daily Telegraph * Such an impressively sustained act of fictional daring: wonderfully weird and worryingly convincing -- Charlotte Mendelson, author of <i>The Exhibitionist</i> Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered . . . as poignant as it is bizarre -- Books of the Year, Megan McCluskey * Time * Batty and brilliant . . . Folk writes tenderly about longing, regret, how ordinary people want a life of consequence and the way tragedy can make someone sick -- Max Jeffery * The Times * This kinky debut spices up the flourishing genre of the Millennial early-midlife crisis novel . . . a little bit JG Ballard, a little bit Ottessa Moshfegh, the surreal premise grabs you from the first page, buoyed by bright, zingy prose. Told with verve - and nerve - it's a full-throttle thrill: strap in! -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail * A very strange and very funny book -- Hannah Kingsley-Ma * Guardian * Girl-meets-plane . . . thanks to novels like Sky Daddy, the right to staggering strangeness, moral messiness, is finally being extended to female characters, too. What's more, they're proving that the topics of women's bodies, and what we want to do with them, are as loaded as ever. -- Emily Watkins * i * Sleek and darkly comical . . . Folk is a dryly funny writer, with the melancholic wit and whimsy of Miranda July . . . Folk's deft navigation between sardonic optimism and buoyant fatalism is perfectly calibrated to the utter strangeness of being alive today -- Michelle Hart * Boston Globe * Bizarre and endearing . . . we can't remember the last time we met a character this singular or read a book this funny -- Oprah's Book Club Kate Folk has an idiosyncratic, spare style that is well suited to her truly odd, ridiculous, inexplicably poignant subject matters . . . buckle up, it's one hell of a ride -- Most anticipated books of 2025 * Literary Hub * Folk fuses Moby-Dick with J. G. Ballard's Crash for a blistering debut novel about a woman's sexual and mortal obsession with airplanes . . . The allure of an inanimate object has seldom been so touchingly rendered than in Folk's wry, tender, and sweetly odd narrative. It's an unforgettable ode to the pursuit of desire -- Starred review * Publishers Weekly * Far and away one of the most audacious and surprisingly feel-good books that 2025 has to offer -- Most exciting books for 2025 * Polygon * Folk - following up her memorably weird and innovative story collection, Out There (2022) - displays a masterful command over Linda's mindset and thought processes in her first-person narration . . . An utterly confident and endearing portrait of a woman unlike anyone readers have met before -- Starred review * Kirkus * A subversive and touching love story -- 2025's Must-Read Novels * Language Arts * Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird -- Rachel Yoder, author of NIGHTBITCH This is the craziest, funniest book I've read in a while. And I read a lot of crazy, funny books. Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane -- Gary Shteyngart, author of OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it -- Rita Bullwinkel, author of the Booker Prize-longlisted HEADSHOT Breathtakingly audacious, Sky Daddy lifts off and swiftly accelerates, breaking the barrier of your preconceptions and disbelief, taking you to utterly new places and insights. . . . A beauteous, drolly funny joy ride -- Ling Ma, author of SEVERANCE Sky Daddy is an exhilarating, addictive and entirely convincing novel, not to mention strangely tender, deeply compassionate, and with pin sharp prose -- Lara Williams, author of SUPPER CLUB Hilarious, refreshing, and perverse, Sky Daddy is a soaring portrait of modern obsession, of knowing exactly what you want and trying to wrestle it from the jaws of our ridiculous world. Kate Folk's sharp sentences and sidesplitting characters sparkle with glorious cringe. Do not miss this flight -- Henry Hoke, author of OPEN THROAT Delightfully weird and totally electric. As arresting as g-forces during takeoff, Kate Folk's Sky Daddy is excellent, and protagonist Linda is one of the most memorable and engaging characters I've come across in a long time. A captivatingly original and uproarious love letter to the strange forces of desire and destiny that drive and connect all of us -- Gina Chung, author of SEA CHANGE Get on board already, Sky Daddy is absurd and poignant, hilarious and gruesome, razor-sharp and tender-hearted. From here on out I'm reading anything and everything with Kate Folk's name on it -- Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT Sky Daddy is the page-turning tale of a self-destructive love affair between a woman and her romantic obsession: a Boeing 737 named N92823. With this brilliant deep dive into the irrational abyss of obsession, Kate Folk proves herself to be a truly original new voice in fiction -- Mat Johnson, author of DARK RAIN I started scribbling 'LOL' in the margins of Sky Daddy, but I stopped when I realized I would do so for nearly every line. By the end, I found myself breathless, shocked, and wonderstruck. On the surface, this is the tale of Linda, an eccentric woman romantically attracted to airplanes, but the novel's emotional underpinnings are anything but absurd. After turning the final page, I could not shake this story of a woman grappling with grief and deep loneliness who bets on her own happiness and refuses to give up. Kate Folk is a singular talent, soaring in a brilliant universe all her own -- Emily Habeck, author of SHARK HEART I finished the book with a renewed sense of humanity * Condé Nast Traveler * Sly, clever . . . Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months -- Constance Grady, Best Books of the Year So Far * Vox * Powerful and wise, Sky Daddy also manages to be the funniest book about sexual obsession that I have ever read -- Colin Winnette, author of USERS Outrageously funny and smartly unsettling -- Ed Park, author of SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS PRAISE FOR KATE FOLK'S OUT THERE 'Wonderfully weird' DAILY MAIL 'Extraordinary . . . Folk is a dazzling talent' KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror' CHANG RAE-LEE, author of A Gesture Life

Author Information

Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There. She has written for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and Zyzzyva. She's received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.

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