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A hilarious and anarchic portrait of a downwardly mobile family in post-crash Dublin

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE HEARST BIG BOOK AWARDS 2019
FINALIST FOR THE BUTLER LITERARY AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS´ CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD
Orchids are liars.
They use pheromones to lure wasps in to become unwitting pollinators. In nature, such exploitative systems are rare. In society, they are everywhere.

Gael Foess is a heroine of mythic proportions. Raised in Dublin by single-minded, careerist parents, she learns from an early age how ideals and ambitions can be compromised. When her father walks out during the 2008 crash, her family falls apart. Determined to build a life-raft for her loved ones, Gael sets off for London and New York, proving how little it takes to game the system - but is it really exploitation if the loser isn´t aware of what he´s losing?

Written in electric, heart-stopping prose, Orchid & the Wasp is a dazzlingly original novel about gigantic ambitions and social upheaval, chewing through sexuality, class and politics with joyful, anarchic fury, announcing Caoilinn Hughes as a rising star of literary fiction.

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´Highly ambitious... Kick-ass, whip-smart and with "a tongue like a catapult", Gael belongs to a venerable tradition of feisty heroines...readers are going to love her.´
Sunday Times

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Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp (Oneworld 2018), which was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards, the Butler Literary Award, the Collyer Bristow Prize, and was longlisted for the Authors´ Club Best First Novel Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Strong/Shine Award and was shortlisted for four other prizes. Her work has appeared in Granta , POETRY , Tin House , Best British Poetry , BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere. She has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and she was recently Visiting Writer at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. For her short fiction, she won The Moth International Short Story Prize 2018 and an O.Henry Prize in 2019.

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