Helen Bain received her PhD in creative writing from King's College London and has master's degrees in modern and contemporary literature and creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She was selected for The London Library Emerging Writers' Program 2020-21 and The Genesis Foundation Emerging Writers' Program 2022-23. In 2024, she won The People's Friend Comedy Fiction Prize. Currently at the Financial Times, she has worked for British Vogue and The Guardian, and she also teaches creative writing at the university level. Helen lives in Sussex. The Daffodil Days is her first novel.

"This virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary... an astonishing achievement, its prose supple and intelligent and exact... ambitious and insightful." --The Guardian

"I adored this novel. It's beautifully written, intricately plotted, wears the precision of its research lightly, and is exquisitely moving. A very special book." ?Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

"A pointillistic, unsentimental, and intimate portrait of Sylvia Plath through the eyes of those whose lives she brushed up against in rural Devon. Helen Bain renders Plath's humor, wit, resilience, and heartbreak from new angles, at once strange and familiar. Not a word is out of place. Full of understated lyricism and a deep respect for Plath and her world, The Daffodil Days is an exquisite and spellbinding debut." --Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

"A breathtaking first novel: elegant, insightful, meticulously crafted, and ingeniously structured. Helen Bain has achieved something remarkable here, demythologizing what we think we know about Sylvia Plath through the glancing perspectives of the figures in her orbit. These incidental characters are rendered with as much richness and complexity as Plath's, and their entanglement is captivating." --Benjamin Wood, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Seascraper

"A luminous, deeply researched debut, The Daffodil Days reimagines Sylvia Plath's Court Green period through a chorus of village voices--letting the known story fall away until what remains feels bracingly human and close. Helen Bain's prose is exact and alive, and the novel builds with a quietly devastating inexorable force you can't look away from." --Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Skylark

"An exceptional novel, with shades of Hilary Mantel. Helen Bain takes the familiar and makes it utterly new. I loved it. I miss it." --Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

"Beautiful, affecting and deeply impressive, this is an ingeniously constructed novel, told slant. I loved it." --Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

"Helen Bain has produced something quietly miraculous. The Daffodil Days brings the characters in a rural community to life... the depth of Bain's meticulous, loving research is never obtrusive. It's a captivating debut: a compassionate, perceptive and truly wonderful book." --Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once

"Helen Bain explores Sylvia Plath's life in reverse while also, cleverly and masterfully, foreshadowing future events... simply delicious." --Peter K. Steinberg, editor of The Prose of Sylvia Plath

Publisher: Scribner Book Company

Pub date: 2026-06-09

Length: 304 pages