Description

‘Inviting, stylish and candid … Pollard’s future, as a novelist, is very bright indeed’ The i

‘Clever, warm, and funny’ Sarah Moss, The Guardian

‘This isn’t the first – and most certainly won’t be the last – pandemic novel, but it might be the most brilliant’ Daily Mail

‘I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don’t want anything to do with it; don’t want it near me’

It is 2020 and in a time more turbulent than any of us could have ever imagined, a woman is attempting to write a book about prophecy in the ancient world.

Navigating the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a ten-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes fixated on our many forms of divination and prediction: on oracles, tarot cards and tea leaves and the questions we have always asked as we scroll and click and rage against our fates.

But in doing so she fails to notice the future creeping into the heart of her own home. For despite our best intentions – our sacrifices and our bargains with the gods – time, certainty and, sometimes, those we love, can still slip away …

Heartbreakingly relatable and achingly funny Delphi is both a snapshot and a time capsule, deftly capturing our pasts, our presents, and how we keep on going in a world that is ever more uncertain and absurd.

‘Delphi is a compact miracle of a book’ Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock

‘Bold, brave and uncompromising, Pollard has found a way to write about the last couple of years which is both truthful and enjoyable to read, which I didn’t think was possible’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Everyone is Still Alive

‘Dark and dangerous, disturbed and disturbing in equal measure – I loved it’ Anna Hope, author of Expectation

Publisher Review

'Consoling, harrowing, hilarious. I feel like it's healed me ...Pollard's narrator is so funny and so radically honest it leaves you reeling' * Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets * 'Vivid as fireworks, Delphi explodes with the ambivalence, rage and dread of middle years lived within a world of pandemic and climate collapse. Both terrifying and exhilarating' * Doireann Ni Ghriofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat * 'Using language that charms and beguiles, Clare Pollard cleverly creates moments of the darkest deja vu, so that I was swept up into a story which I was both unnerved and reassured to recognise' * Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground * 'Clare Pollard's DELPHI delivers an urgency unlike any I've experienced. I loved this book so much; the language, the humour, the style, which reminded me of both Patricia Lockwood and Sheila Heti. A brilliant novel born of searing eloquence and sinister wit' * Jackie Polzin, author of Brood *