Sky Daddy

'Truly original, deeply weird' - Daily Telegraph

By: Kate Folk

Narrated by: Kristen Sieh

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, VOX, AND VULTURE

'Batty and brilliant'
THE TIMES

'Truly original . . . deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt'
DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Very strange and very funny'
GUARDIAN

'Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird'
RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH

'This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it'
RITA BULLWINKEL, author of Booker Prize-longlisted HEADSHOT

Linda makes $20 an hour as a content moderator, flagging comments that violate a tech conglomerate's terms and conditions. Each night, she returns to the windowless room in a garage that she rents from a family who pretend she isn't there.

But once a month, she escapes to San Francisco International Airport for a clandestine meeting on the cheapest flight out that night. Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to planes: their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could.

Linda believes her destiny is to someday 'marry' one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite her with her soulmate plane for eternity. So when her co-worker Karina invites her to join a group of women using vision boards to manifest their desires, she can't resist the chance to hasten her romantic fate. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly - and more literally - than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong towards her greatest dream.©2025 Kate Folk

Critic reviews

Folk has written something truly original here: the kind of novel that startles you into remembering fiction's potential to be simultaneously deeply weird, deeply funny and deeply felt . . . Sky Daddy's deadpan humour is exquisite . . . in a fiction landscape that often bends toward the familiar and marketable, Sky Daddy reminds us that the novel's real job is to stretch the imagination to its most exhilarating limits. The best fiction doesn't just mirror desire - it deranges it, making us see the world, and ourselves, afresh' (Amber Medland)

Such an impressively sustained act of fictional daring: wonderfully weird and worryingly convincing (Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist)

Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered . . . as poignant as it is bizarre (Books of the Year, Megan McCluskey)

Batty and brilliant . . . Folk writes tenderly about longing, regret, how ordinary people want a life of consequence and the way tragedy can make someone sick (Max Jeffery)

This kinky debut spices up the flourishing genre of the Millennial early-midlife crisis novel . . . a little bit JG Ballard, a little bit Ottessa Moshfegh, the surreal premise grabs you from the first page, buoyed by bright, zingy prose. Told with verve - and nerve - it's a full-throttle thrill: strap in! (Anthony Cummins)

A very strange and very funny book (Hannah Kingsley-Ma)

Girl-meets-plane . . . thanks to novels like Sky Daddy, the right to staggering strangeness, moral messiness, is finally being extended to female characters, too. What's more, they're proving that the topics of women's bodies, and what we want to do with them, are as loaded as ever. (Emily Watkins)

Sleek and darkly comical . . . Folk is a dryly funny writer, with the melancholic wit and whimsy of Miranda July . . . Folk's deft navigation between sardonic optimism and buoyant fatalism is perfectly calibrated to the utter strangeness of being alive today (Michelle Hart)

Bizarre and endearing . . . we can't remember the last time we met a character this singular or read a book this funny (Oprah's Book Club)

Kate Folk has an idiosyncratic, spare style that is well suited to her truly odd, ridiculous, inexplicably poignant subject matters . . . buckle up, it's one hell of a ride (Most anticipated books of 2025)

Folk fuses Moby-Dick with J. G. Ballard's Crash for a blistering debut novel about a woman's sexual and mortal obsession with airplanes . . . The allure of an inanimate object has seldom been so touchingly rendered than in Folk's wry, tender, and sweetly odd narrative. It's an unforgettable ode to the pursuit of desire (Starred review)