New Novel By Associate Professor Leslie Jamison to Hit Shelves in 2027
The Daughters, a new novel by Associate Professor Leslie Jamison, is set to hit the shelves in February 2027. The novel, published by Little, Brown and Company, tells a multi-generational story which grounds itself in the myth of The Minotaur.
The story spans three different time periods. The first part is set in Knossos, 1550 BC. The witch queen Pasiphaë, who has been wed to the tyrannical King Minos, makes a bargain and gives birth to the Minotaur. She is then left to learn how to love a son the world believes is a monster. The second part of the novel is set in New York, 1994, where a woman named Beth dreams of a life beyond the suburbs. An old friend calls Beth and, after encountering an ancient image, Beth sees her world torn apart, forcing a choice upon her. The final section is set in 1997 Crete. Jac, deep within the grief following her father’s death, finds unexpected solace with women living in the hills of Crete. As she remains in the community, dark secrets begin to rise to the surface.
Jamison has penned a series of successful books including New York Times best sellers Splinters (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), The Recovering (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), and The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014). Already, The Daughters has been met with significant praise. National Book Award Finalist Kaveh Akbar said the novel “is a powerhouse, blistering and frank. Jamison builds ravishing eddies of chaos and redemption. There’s centripetal delight in all the vortical whoosh, in seeing the universal unspoken set down in ink. I’ll be thinking about The Daughters—its final pages, its final line—forever.”
In an interview with House Magazine, Jamison shared that, “In The Daughters, I got to have the most reckless and explosive relationship to time that I’ve had in any of my books.” She went on to explain that, “One of the fundamental questions of the novel is how we take the stories of the past and reshape them to suit our purposes in the present. So I’m fundamentally interested in the way two different women engage with the myth of the Minotaur—what they need it to be and do, to give them a home to live in, to give them a way to understand their own regret or guilt or love. That question, 'How does a myth or story become something radically different for each person?,' is a really beautiful, interesting one to me, and it was fun to play it out across these vast temporal distances.”
The Daughters will be available for purchase on February 9, 2027. More information about the novel can be found here.
Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of five books: two essay collections, The Empathy Exams, and Make It Scream, Make It Burn; two memoirs, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, and Splinters; and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. The Empathy Exams, chosen as a Notable Book of 2014 and an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times, was named one of the Top 10 Books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Oprah, Slate, Salon, The L Magazine, and Time Out: New York. The Recovering was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly and the best-reviewed memoir of 2018 by LitHub, and was a finalist for the American Booksellers Association Book Award. Both Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams were finalists for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A National Magazine Award finalist, Jamison is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, and her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Bookforum, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She has a PhD in English from Yale University, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and an AB from Harvard College. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.