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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE DAUGHTER SHIP

Boo Trundle

Boo Trundle's debut novel The Daughter Ship is an exploration of the inheritance of shame, narrated by a darkly comedic chorus, the submerged inner selves of a daughter, wife, and mother.
Katherine Burns is a 45-year-old mother of two in New Jersey who's financially dependent on her distant husband Phil. Katherine has been in therapy for years. She's been in recovery even longer—ever since she pulled out of a downward spiral as an Ivy League stripper and got sober.

When Katherine's marriage disintegrates, her center cannot hold, and her inner world becomes increasingly real—and dangerous. Scout, Smooshed Bug, and Star are Katherine's troubled inner children. They can survive only if Katherine recognizes them. These lost girls, along with Katherine's ancestors, going back to the Civil War, are voiced through the radio system in an old submarine, where they have made their home since Katherine was a child. As the submarine creaks into service after decades of rusting on the ocean floor, Katherine is forced closer and closer to a shameful secret—and her life depends on facing it.

An unabashedly ambitious and daring book about the legacies of trauma and shame, The Daughter Ship is for readers who care about the powerful unseen forces that affect our lives, loves, families, and future, both as individuals and as a collective. For fans of emotionally riveting and twisty marriage novels like Department of Speculation and Fates and Furies, or the candid intimacy of Three Women, The Daughter Ship is a propulsive, enlightening read that gives readers a radical new language for self-discovery and unraveling inherited family energies.

Boo Trundle's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Prairie Schooner, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Nervous Breakdown, Atticus Review, and other publications. Her stories have taken her to many stages including The Nantucket Project, The ConnectFour Ideas Festival, Listen to Your Mother, the Jersey Storytellers Project, and The Moth. Boo lives with her two teenagers in Maplewood, New Jersey.
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Book

Published by Pantheon

Comments

“This is a stunningly original, compulsively readable, darkly funny, and profoundly moving novel about the emotional cargo women carry in our minds and bodies, and how healing is possible—even from our deepest, darkest secrets.”