Gloss

Synopsis

Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet one summer at Golden Apples Farm in rural California, where the charismatic Lee, an apple farmer and cook, runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from eating disorders. A year later, they reunite to testify at his trial. 

Transposing the Greek myth of the Hesperides to Marin County at the turn of the millennium, Gloss is an unconventional psychological thriller with feminist bite. From the fragmented chorus of the girls’ voices emerges a surreal, kaleidoscopic picture of trauma and its aftermath: ambivalence, guilt, denial, lingering fascination, and the gaps left by things too difficult to speak aloud. Wilder paints desire and disgust alike in sensuous, delicate prose which captures the magnetic pull of forbidden fruit.

'Taut and vivid. It is like stepping into a delicately described hallucinatory nightmare and I was completely mesmerised all the way through. The themes of coercive control and psychological disintegration are so chilling and important.' — Suzanne Joinson, author of The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things

‘Eerie and sensuous, written in prose as crisp as a Golden Delicious, Gloss reveals, as in a myth, a world of simmering violence and coercion hiding beneath the surface of the everyday, and the dark places to which it leads.’ — Philip Terry, author of Dante’s Purgatorio

Praise for Kyra Wilder’s Little Bandaged Days:

‘Gripping, composed, observant, wonderfully written and extravagantly cruel.’
— Daisy Hildyard, Guardian