Gloss

Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet one summer at Golden Apples Farm in rural California, where the charismatic Lee, an apple farmer and cook, runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from eating disorders. A year later, they reunite to testify at his trial.

Their individual and collective stories build into a multifaceted picture of trauma and survival in this psychological thriller infused with magic realism. In sensuous, hypnotic prose, Wilder captures the magnetic pull of forbidden fruit.

Kyra Wilder grew up in the Pacific Northwest and went on to study at the Culinary Institute of America. She cooked in restaurants in California and New York and was the pasta-maker in Michael Tusk's now Michelin-starred restaurant Quince, before receiving her BA and MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University. She continued working in restaurants before moving to Switzerland with her young family, where she wrote her critically acclaimed first novel Little Bandaged Days (2020). She has had poetry and articles published in The Paris Review, Literary Hub, and McSweeney’s.

• ‘An inventive, and absorbing, portrait of girlhood interrupted.’ – Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
• 'A sinister nexus of gluttony, anorexia and forbidden desire.(...) Gloss, the beguiling second novel by American writer Kyra Wilder, is a loose riff on the Greek myth of the Hesperides.' — Claire Allfree, Daily Telegraph, four-star review
• 'Taut and vivid. It is like stepping into a delicately described hallucinatory nightmare and I was completely mesmerised all the way through. The themes of coercive control and psychological disintegration are so chilling and important.' – Suzanne Joinson, author of The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things
• ‘This slender, superbly creepy novel combines elements of a psychological thriller with mythology-infused magic realism. (…) It weaves in subtle insights into the gender imbalance among anorexia sufferers, enduring failures in its treatment and the profoundly insidious nature of coercive control.’ – Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail ‘Best Literary Fiction out for Spring’
• ‘A crisp forensic tale of resilience... chilling and memorable.’ – Paul Burke
• ‘Eerie and sensuous, written in prose as crisp as a Golden Delicious, Gloss reveals, as in a myth, a world of simmering violence and coercion hiding beneath the surface of the everyday, and the dark places to which it leads.’ – Philip Terry, author of Dante’s Purgatorio

• 'Gripping, composed, observant, wonderfully written and extravagantly cruel.[...] The story comes closer to reality when it dramatises something wider: the performance of an enviable lifestyle, and the various miseries that make this performance possible.' - Daisy Hildyard, Guardian
• 'Beautifully written and frighteningly honest, this feverish debut delivers a brave appraisal of a woman's spiral into madness.' - Sunday Express
• 'Wilder artfully cranks up the tension, so you don't quite know when you begin to hold your breath. A chilling read' - Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer