by Kyra Wilder

Publication date: 25 February 2025

Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet one summer at Golden Apples Farm in rural California, where the charismatic Lee, an apple farmer and cook, runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from eating disorders. A year later, they reunite to testify at his trial. 

Their individual and collective stories build into a multifaceted picture of trauma and survival in this psychological thriller infused with magic realism. In sensuous, hypnotic prose, Wilder captures the magnetic pull of forbidden fruit.

Exclusive excerpt ‘The heron and and snake’ on Bookanista
One of Hephzibah Anderson’s three ‘Best Literary Fiction out for Spring’ picks

'An inventive, and absorbing, portrait of girlhood interrupted.'
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

'Taut and vivid. It is like stepping into a delicately described hallucinatory nightmare and I was completely mesmerised all the way through. The themes of coercive control and psychological disintegration are so chilling and important.'
— Suzanne Joinson, author of The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things

‘Eerie and sensuous, written in prose as crisp as a Golden Delicious, Gloss reveals, as in a myth, a world of simmering violence and coercion hiding beneath the surface of the everyday, and the dark places to which it leads.’
— Philip Terry, author of Dante’s Purgatorio

Praise for Kyra Wilder’s Little Bandaged Days:

‘Gripping, composed, observant, wonderfully written and extravagantly cruel.’
— Daisy Hildyard, Guardian

‘Beautifully written and frighteningly honest.’
— Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

‘Wilder artfully cranks up the tension, so you don't quite know when you begin to hold your breath. A chilling read’
— Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer

Paperback original with dust jacket
184 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-5-4

For orders to the EU, please contact us about your local retailers.

This book is published with financial support from the Fondation Jan Michalski.