Dayspring

By: Anthony Oliveira

Narrated by: Davin Babulal, Landon Doak, Kai Cheng Thom, David Demchuk, Anthony Oliveira, Rowan Jette Knox, Alicia Elliott, Nadia Shammas, Iain Stewart, Amanda Cordner, Carole Pope

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Shortlisted for the 2024 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers

A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.

There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild.

In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved—his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound.

Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life.

Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, Dayspring is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse.

©2024 Anthony Oliveira (P)2024 Strange Light

Critic reviews

“Ambitiously and audaciously, Anthony Oliveira transforms scripture into a poetic and erotic queer love story. Dayspring crosses centuries and genres, bends fan fiction into dazzling verse, and mixes the sacred and the profane with the sublime and the perverse. In a sly nod to red letter bibles, Oliveira uses blood-coloured ink to render the words of Jesus, who emerges as fallible and playful, horny and tender. With the heft of a tome, the lure of a page-turner, and the sweep of an epic poem, Dayspring is an effervescent and poignant work about love and humanity.”—2024 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers jury (Jillian Christmas, Adam Garnet Jones, and Hazel Jane Plante)

"What can one say about a masterpiece? Refracting and recombining Christ's journey in the Gospels with the contemporary queer experience—very often the author's own—Anthony Oliveira commingles the earthly and the divine in a deliciously daring work that defies categorization. God is love, we are told, and Dayspring celebrates and interrogates that love in all its forms, illuminating the sacred and the profane in equal measure. Bracing and breathtaking, it is a glorious gift to the soul and the senses. This is a magnificent debut!"—David Demchuk, author of Red X

“Are you ready to be saved, slain, and resurrected by the power of the written word? Are you ready to redefine the meaning of sacredness in the name of all that is queer and holy? It is time to read Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira. This incredible work of verse not only defies genre, but reinvents it entirely, bending space and time to tell the story of Jesus (as you have always imagined, but never seen Him) and the disciple He loved in poetic language that evokes all the passion of the Psalms. Astonishingly beautiful and unrepentantly sexy, this is a book that is sure to both heal and challenge its readers in all the most important ways. To open its pages is to open your heart to a vision of love that is as deeply, tragically, and courageously human as it is divine.”—Kai Cheng Thom, author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human

An overwhelming experience

Reading the book alone would have been an illuminating experience, but reading along with this flawless narration raises it even higher.

The Unholy Divine

This book feels like it was written *for me* in a way no other book ever has. It is beautiful, funny, horny, sacrilegious, sincere, devout, and unflinchingly honest. The recording does a tremendous job bringing it to life. I am extremely grateful it exists and cannot wait to reread it.

Your mileage will vary

what this ultimately comes down to is a thesis regarding our experience with the world and what happens when the profane and the prophetic collide. this is not a mere retelling of Christian scriptures, but a tale of connection and finding family. it is a genuinely queer work. as I put in the title, this will not be for everyone and your mileage will vary depending on your personal views and prior experiences. this book combines and rice at her most lowered and her most pious, and I mean that with the highest praise possible.

An Excellent Marriage of Story and Art

This book reminds me that the Gospel is both shocking and beautiful. Well informed. Well written. Well performed.

In love with gay Jesus

I’m a 40 year old ex-vangelical gay-thiest.
Which is to say I grew up loving Jesus but had it beat out of me after coming out of the closet.

That said, gosh this book was beautiful!
It’s not that it’s just a partial view of the gospels written with two men in love. The face that it’s finally told, erotically, truthfully, and completely is what means so much.

Maybe this won’t be a hit with everyone. But I highly reccomend the audio version of this tale.

Thanks for sharing it Anthony!