Beautiful, affecting and deeply impressive, this is an ingeniously constructed novel, told slant. I loved it.

Louise Kennedy, author of TRESPASSES

An exceptional novel, with shades of Hilary Mantel. Helen Bain takes the familiar and makes it utterly new. I loved it. I miss it

Meg Mason, author of SORROW AND BLISS

A luminous, deeply researched debut, The Daffodil Days reimagines Sylvia Plath's Court Green period through a chorus of village voices – letting the known story fall away until what remains feels bracingly human and close. Helen Bain's prose is exact and alive, and the novel builds with a quietly devastating inexorable force you can't look away from

Paula McLain, author of THE PARIS WIFE

A pointillistic, unsentimental, and intimate portrait of Sylvia Plath through the eyes of those whose lives she brushed up against in rural Devon. Bain renders Plath's humor, wit, resilience, and heartbreak from new angles, at once strange and familiar. Not a word is out of place. Full of understated lyricism and a deep respect for Plath and her world, The Daffodil Days is an exquisite and spellbinding debut

Heather Clark, author of Red Comet

Helen Bain has produced something quietly miraculous. The Daffodil Days brings the characters in a rural community to life in a way that evokes Andrew Miller's A Land in Winter ... the depth of Bain's meticulous, loving research is never obtrusive. It's a captivating debut: a compassionate, perceptive and truly wonderful book

Miranda Seymour

You would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary

Melissa Harrison, Guardian