Sky Daddy

The word-of-mouth hit about one woman's quest to unite forever with a plane in a crash.

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'

Such an impressively sustained act of fictional daring: wonderfully weird and worryingly convincing

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

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

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!

A very strange and very funny book

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.

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

Bizarre and endearing . . . we can't remember the last time we met a character this singular or read a book this funny

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

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

Far and away one of the most audacious and surprisingly feel-good books that 2025 has to offer

Folk - following up her memorably weird and innovative story collection, Out There (2022) - displays a masterful command over Linda's mindset and thought processes in her first-person narration . . . An utterly confident and endearing portrait of a woman unlike anyone readers have met before

A subversive and touching love story

Audaciously imagined . Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender . Deliciously weird

This is the craziest, funniest book I've read in a while. And I read a lot of crazy, funny books. Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane

This book is a dog whistle for the true freaks - never have I felt so seen! I loved it

Breathtakingly audacious , Sky Daddy lifts off and swiftly accelerates, breaking the barrier of your preconceptions and disbelief, taking you to utterly new places and insights. . . . A beauteous, drolly funny joy ride

Sky Daddy is an exhilarating, addictive and entirely convincing novel, not to mention strangely tender, deeply compassionate , and with pin sharp prose

Hilarious, refreshing, and perverse , Sky Daddy is a soaring portrait of modern obsession, of knowing exactly what you want and trying to wrestle it from the jaws of our ridiculous world. Kate Folk's sharp sentences and sidesplitting characters sparkle with glorious cringe. Do not miss this flight

Delightfully weird and totally electric . As arresting as g-forces during takeoff, Kate Folk's Sky Daddy is excellent, and protagonist Linda is one of the most memorable and engaging characters I've come across in a long time. A captivatingly original and uproarious love letter to the strange forces of desire and destiny that drive and connect all of us

Get on board already, Sky Daddy is absurd and poignant, hilarious and gruesome, razor-sharp and tender-hearted . From here on out I'm reading anything and everything with Kate Folk's name on it

Sky Daddy is the page-turning tale of a self-destructive love affair between a woman and her romantic obsession: a Boeing 737 named N92823. With this brilliant deep dive into the irrational abyss of obsession, Kate Folk proves herself to be a truly original new voice in fiction

I started scribbling 'LOL' in the margins of Sky Daddy , but I stopped when I realized I would do so for nearly every line. By the end, I found myself breathless, shocked, and wonderstruck. On the surface, this is the tale of Linda, an eccentric woman romantically attracted to airplanes, but the novel's emotional underpinnings are anything but absurd. After turning the final page, I could not shake this story of a woman grappling with grief and deep loneliness who bets on her own happiness and refuses to give up. Kate Folk is a singular talent, soaring in a brilliant universe all her own

I finished the book with a renewed sense of humanity

Sly, clever . . . Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months

Powerful and wise, Sky Daddy also manages to be the funniest book about sexual obsession that I have ever read

Outrageously funny and smartly unsettling

PRAISE FOR KATE FOLK'S OUT THERE

'Wonderfully weird'
DAILY MAIL

'Extraordinary . . . Folk is a dazzling talent'
KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror '
CHANG RAE-LEE, author of A Gesture Life

Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There. She has written for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and Zyzzyva. She's received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.