by Kyra Wilder

Publication date: February 2025

In this semi-experimental second novel, Kyra Wilder transposes the Greek myth of the  Hesperides to Marin County in California at the turn of the Millennium.
Ari, Eleni and Hesper, three young adults struggling with an eating disorder that is never named, are reunited after they met one summer at the unconventional, rural treatment facility Golden Apples Farm. A trial is underway, and the girls attempt to elucidate what it is exactly that happened with Lee, the charismatic man and passionate cook who runs Golden Apples. With childlike candour and a lightness of tone that belies the seriousness of her subject Wilder elaborates a kaleidoscopic picture of trauma, in the protagonists’ own words. Through a succession of short chapters, evocative of a study in music, Gloss makes for a new psychological thriller with surreal hijinks,  bringing together the symbolic and the hyperreal, and opposites that are somehow never so far apart: succulence and abjection, human and animal stories, traditional cuisine and synthetic foods, speleology, deep sea diving, remembering and forgetting, healing and hurting, or tending unpicked apples — to perhaps discover all that a girl may and can be. 

Praise for Little Bandaged Days:

‘Beautifully written and frighteningly honest, this feverish debut delivers a brave appraisal of a woman’s spiral into madness.’ — Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

‘Gripping, composed, observant, wonderfully written and extravagantly cruel.[…] The story comes closer to reality when it dramatises something wider: the performance of an enviable lifestyle, and the various miseries that make this performance possible.’ — Daisy Hildyard, Guardian

‘Wilder artfully cranks up the tension, so you don't quite know when you begin to hold your breath. A chilling read’ — Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer

Paperback original
250 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-5-4

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