Daphnis and Chloe
By Colin McAdam
Biblioasis, October 13, 2026
A dark fable about love and innocence and beauty in an ever darker world.
There's a city on an island in the Pacific that can only be reached by ferry, a city where a mechanic named Frank opens a garage with his old friend Charlie, and in which they each marry women they love but with whom they cannot have children. There are drugs on the streets of this city that take away pain for strings of minutes and bring synthetic rapture; and it is these streets that give each couple babies that they find abandoned under strange circumstances, babies that that they bring into their homes and raise as their own. The boy they name Daphnis, and the girl Chloe.
And so begins a book unlike anything else in Colin McAdam's oeuvre, a modern retelling of an ancient story, a dark fable about love and innocence in an even darker world. Part Ovid and part True Romance, and narrated by Eros himself, Daphnis and Chloe offers a pulpy meditation on love and beauty, of people triumphing over darkness by wrestling deep within it, of the solace of art, and of the simple but profound pleasure provided to a blind old man as he holds his wife's hand and listens to an increasingly familiar story.
Praise for Black Dove
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
”I have long been convinced that Colin McAdam is a literary genius. What’s extraordinary is that each of the books he writes is a totally distinct type of genius. Every time. He’s in a league of his own.”
—Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
”McAdam chronicles a boy’s magical transformation in this brooding, memorable outing... Readers will be enchanted by this dark adventure.” –Publishers Weekly
"Fairy tales have always contained elements of nightmares, but rarely are they so graphically presented... McAdam posits storytelling as a kind of apotropaic magic that wards off tragedy by depicting its most frightening forms. I think I see what this gifted and unpredictable author is after, but I’m not yet ready to forgive him for subjecting me to such terrors." –The Wall Street Journal
“Colin McAdam conjures, in intoxicating prose, a grief-haunted boy offered a kind of Mephistophelean deal by a contemporary Dr. Moreau. Black Dove is tenderly nightmarish and toughly tender—a divine tale of yearning and revenge served up red-hot and with a side of broken hearts.”
—Zsuzsi Gartner, Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of The Beguiling
“Colin McAdam’s voice is original and fiercely intelligent. It somehow possesses this combination of hard-won world weariness and exuberant, unshakeable faith in a better world. He exposes all of our treacherous and base instincts but with the unspoken caveat that, in spite of our horrible human ways, we must always, relentlessly, struggle to love each other. Aside from McAdam’s great talents as a storyteller, it’s this feeling I get from his work, profoundly moving, that I strive to duplicate in my own writing.”
—Miriam Toews, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Fight Night and Women Talking
“Black Dove is an eerie, unsettling, fabulous book. McAdam leads the reader through quotidian and mythical realms with absolute assurance. Stark and beautiful, horrifying and lyrical, its pages thrum with flight, transformation, grief, revenge, transcendence, the remorseless power of stories and the very nature of creation. Ever since reading, Black Dove has drifted in and out of my dreams.”
—Helen Macdonald, author of the New York Times-bestselling H Is For Hawk
"If, like me, you read to have your mind blown and your heart stretched, then Colin McAdam’s darkly magnificent Black Dove is for you. McAdam never writes a false sentence and is unflinching in his depiction of human cruelty, violence, but also the most delicate and ennobling love. Black Dove is an extraordinary feat of imagination and of art.”
—David Bezmozgis, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Immigrant City
About the Author
Colin McAdam is an internationally acclaimed novelist with a PhD from Cambridge on translations of Ancient Greek—the original language of Daphnis and Chloe. He has written non-fiction for Harper’s, Granta, Salon, and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his novels have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize, and the Giller Prize. He lives in Quebec. He is the author of Some Great Thing, Fall, A Beautiful Truth, and Black Dove
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