Praise for Orchid & the Wasp: A gem of a novel about the way we live now. - ELLE Hughes has created something special in Gael, who is her own woman in a way we don't see often enough in books: brave, complex, fractured, intelligent, resourceful, ruthless and unforgiving... Orchid & the Wasp is this year's Conversations with Friends...Hughes casts her unique gaze, her artistic, analytical and emotional intelligence, on ... our capitalist world and the personal, political and social ramifications implicit in our acquiescence to, or indeed, championing of, its values. - Irish Times Not since Paul Murray's Skippy Dies have I read such an original Irish novel... Dazzling, heady fiction. Hughes is an award-winning poet and it's barely concealable. She simply dances on the page, her imagination is riotous, her flawed characters have shape and colour and sometimes heartbreaking humanity. - Irish Independent Caoilinn Hughes is an award-winning poet and her background in poetry shines through Orchid & the Wasp's audacious and meticulously crafted prose. It's a mesmeric, immersive, often hilarious reading experience, driven by the force of the imagery-rich writing and the cast of distinctive characters.... Gael is a fresh and fascinating picaresque heroine - admirable, reprehensible, empowered, bisexual, containing multitudes, the kind of woman rarely depicted in fiction.... Her high-wire act is exhilarating to witness, as, throughout the novel, is Hughes's own. - Sunday Independent Caoilinn Hughes's highly ambitious fiction debut contains multitudes. ... Kick-ass, whip-smart and with a tongue like a catapult, Gael belongs to a venerable tradition of feisty heroines. ... Some serious intellectual themes are explored: the crisis of late capitalism; the redemptive power of art and love; free expression in sexual matters; and much else besides. But maybe most strikingly, Gael Foess makes a telling contribution to the unlikeable female narrator debate... readers are going to love her. - Sunday Times Debut novelist Hughes, an award-winning poet, employs wry, crackling prose to proffer existential questions about what constitutes a meaningful life.... This inventive book will entice readers who prefer the ambiguity of questions to the simplicity of answers. - Library Journal [A] visceral and electrifying debut ... in Gael, Hughes has created a mesmerizing and compelling force. - Booklist Hughes delivers a compelling exploration of what it means to create art, skewering the arbitrary restrictions of art-world gatekeepers along the way. At the emotional heart of this book lies a darker question, though: What does it mean to make a performance of your own life, in service of your family, when the cost might be to lose them forever? As strange, musical, and carefully calculated as its unusual heroine. - Kirkus Orchid & the Wasp is a gorgeous novel told in an onrush of wit and ferocity. Art-forging, smack-talking, long-distance-running Gael Foess, three times smarter than everyone around her, proves to be an unforgettable heroine, and her journey will rattle your most basic assumptions about money, ambition, and the nature of love. Caoilinn Hughes is a massive talent. - ANTHONY DOERR, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See A razor sharp wit and an astonishing psychological and emotional perceptiveness combine to yield uncommonly rich portraiture in this bracing book by a deadly talented writer, in prose so refined one slows to savor each beautifully unfolding sentence. Unsentimental, yet sneakily moving and given to surprising bouts of joy, Orchid & the Wasp becomes a referendum on the resiliency of selflessness in a contemporary world steeped in the logic of ambitious self-advancement. ― MATTHEW THOMAS, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves Though the stories she tells work their way through elaborate worlds, it is her characters, deta sakriti opis