Daisy Johnson Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Daisy Johnson
Author Daisy Johnson was born in the year 1990 in Paignton, Devon, and grew up around Saffron Walden, Essex. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University before she earned her master’s degree in Creative Writing at Somerville College, Oxford, where she also worked at Blackwell’s bookshop.

During her time at Oxford, she won the 2014 AM Heath Prize for fiction as she worked on her first short story collection. Shortly after that, she won the Harper’s Bazaar short story prize for “What the House Remembers”. Her collection “Fen”, won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2017.

Daisy worked on “Everything Under”, her debut novel, for four years, beginning work on it at the same time as her short story collection as a personal challenge to herself to write something a bit longer. She went through at least five drafts of the novel, which she has stated had seeds in her studies of the Greek myth about Oedipus, making several changes to setting and characters, and it was titled (for a time) “Eggtooth”.

“Sisters” was inspired by the haunted house stories she watched and read, and the book started as the tiny seed of an idea of seeing if she could write her own haunted novel. Daisy’s always loved the haunted house, in almost everything she writes there’s a haunted space or a monster in some way. The more that she worked on the novel the more obvious it became that she also really wanted to write about a very intense sibling relationship, an overwhelming, overpowering relationship that is both terrible and wonderful. It’s a book about love, she figures.

Her short fiction has appeared in the Warwick Review and the Boston Review. “Everything Under” got shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, making her the youngest writer to get shortlisted for the prize.

Daisy’s favorite authors include John Burnside, Stephen King, Helen Oyeyemi, and Evie Wyld. And her favorite poets include Sharon Olds and Robin Robertson. She suggests that she would’ve become a shepherd, had she wound up being unsuccessful as a writer.

“Fen” is the first short story collection and was released in 2017. Daisy’s “Fen”, which is set in the fenlands of England, transmutes the uncanny, flat landscape into a brooding and rich atmosphere. From such territory grows stories which blend restless invention and folklore in order to turn out something that’s entirely new.

Amid the marshy paths of the fens, a teen may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A boy may just return from the dead in the guise of a fox. A house may fall in love with a girl and become jealous of her friend.

Out beyond the confines of realism, the familiar instincts of hunger and sex blend with the shifting, unpredictable wild as the line between animal and human is effaced by metamorphosis and myth. With an utterly contemporary and fresh voice, Daisy Johnson lays bare these tales of women that test the limits of their own power to create a startling piece of fiction.

This is a singular debut which marks a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent’s emergence.

“Everything Under” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2018. A watery and spooky reimagining of the Oedipus myth that’s set on the canals of Oxford.

The dictionary does not contain every single world. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this much better than most people do. She grew up on this houseboat with her mom, wandering around the canals of Oxford and speaking this private language of their own personal invention. Her mom vanished when Gretel was just a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has attempted to move on, spending her days updating entries in the dictionary.

A single phone call from her mom is all that it takes for the past to come rushing back. Gretel, in order to find her, is going to have to recover some buried memories of her last and fateful winter on the canals. One runaway boy had found shelter and community with both of them, and the three were haunted by their past and being stalked by an ominous creature that lurks in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at the same time, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing that she feared the most. And now that she’s searching for her mom, she will be forced to face it.

Daisy, in this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, explores questions of free will and fate, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships.

This book is just as readable as it is dazzling, filled with some dark revelations and some unsettling twists. Its surreal, watery landscape is going to resonate with fans of “Fen”, and is a daring, moving story which will leave you unstrung and unsettled.

“Sisters” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2020. A haunting tale about two sisters that are caught in a powerful emotional web and wrestling to understand where one of them ends and the other one begins.

July and September, born only ten months apart, are just as thick as thieves, and they never need anybody but each other. Now, after a case of school bullying, the teens have moved away with their single mom to a long abandoned family home close to the shore. In their isolated, new life, July finds that the deep bond she’s always shared with September is shifting in ways that she can’t fully understand.

This creeping sense of unease and dread begins descending inside the house. Outside, meanwhile, the sisters push the boundaries of behavior, until a series of shocking encounters tests the very limits of their shared experience, and forces some stunning revelations about the girls’ future and their past.

Written with radically inventive imagery and language by a writer whose work has been described as being “wild and weird and wonderfully unsettling”, “entrancing”, and “a force of nature”, and is a one-two punch of heartache and wild fury. Daisy delivers a powerful, taut, and deeply moving account of sibling love and what happens when two sisters have to face one another’s darkest impulses.