Sky Daddy
- Author Kate Folk
- Narrator Kristen Sieh
- Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
- Publish Date 8 April 2025
- Run Time 9 hours and 24 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Narrative theme: Interior life, Narrative theme: Love and relationships.
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What to expect
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, VOX, AND VULTURE
'Batty and brilliant'
THE TIMES
'Truly original . . . deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Very strange and very funny'
GUARDIAN
'Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird'
RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH
'This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it'
RITA BULLWINKEL, author of Booker Prize-longlisted HEADSHOT
Linda makes $20 an hour as a content moderator, flagging comments that violate a tech conglomerate's terms and conditions. Each night, she returns to the windowless room in a garage that she rents from a family who pretend she isn't there.
But once a month, she escapes to San Francisco International Airport for a clandestine meeting on the cheapest flight out that night. Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to planes: their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could.
Linda believes her destiny is to someday 'marry' one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite her with her soulmate plane for eternity. So when her co-worker Karina invites her to join a group of women using vision boards to manifest their desires, she can't resist the chance to hasten her romantic fate. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly - and more literally - than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong towards her greatest dream.
'Batty and brilliant'
THE TIMES
'Truly original . . . deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Very strange and very funny'
GUARDIAN
'Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird'
RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH
'This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it'
RITA BULLWINKEL, author of Booker Prize-longlisted HEADSHOT
Linda makes $20 an hour as a content moderator, flagging comments that violate a tech conglomerate's terms and conditions. Each night, she returns to the windowless room in a garage that she rents from a family who pretend she isn't there.
But once a month, she escapes to San Francisco International Airport for a clandestine meeting on the cheapest flight out that night. Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to planes: their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could.
Linda believes her destiny is to someday 'marry' one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite her with her soulmate plane for eternity. So when her co-worker Karina invites her to join a group of women using vision boards to manifest their desires, she can't resist the chance to hasten her romantic fate. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly - and more literally - than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong towards her greatest dream.
Critics Review
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'
Such an impressively sustained act of fictional daring: wonderfully weird and worryingly convincing
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
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
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!
A very strange and very funny book
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.
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
Bizarre and endearing . . . we can't remember the last time we met a character this singular or read a book this funny
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
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
Far and away one of the most audacious and surprisingly feel-good books that 2025 has to offer
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
A subversive and touching love story
Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird
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
This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it
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
Sky Daddy is an exhilarating, addictive and entirely convincing novel, not to mention strangely tender, deeply compassionate, and with pin sharp prose
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
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
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
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
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
I finished the book with a renewed sense of humanity
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
Powerful and wise, Sky Daddy also manages to be the funniest book about sexual obsession that I have ever read
Outrageously funny and smartly unsettling
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
'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
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