‘Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird’
RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH
‘Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane’
GARY SHTEYNGART, author of OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS
‘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
‘Breathtakingly audacious . . . a beauteous, drolly funny joy ride’
LING MA, author of Severance
‘Buckle up, it’s one hell of a ride’
LITERARY HUB, Most anticipated books for 2025
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.
RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH
‘Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane’
GARY SHTEYNGART, author of OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS
‘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
‘Breathtakingly audacious . . . a beauteous, drolly funny joy ride’
LING MA, author of Severance
‘Buckle up, it’s one hell of a ride’
LITERARY HUB, Most anticipated books for 2025
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.
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Reviews
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
Far and away one of the most audacious and surprisingly feel-good books that 2025 has to offer
A subversive and touching love story
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
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
Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird
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
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
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
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
Sky Daddy is an exhilarating, addictive and entirely convincing novel, not to mention strangely tender, deeply compassionate, and with pin sharp prose
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
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