Daphnis and Chloe

A 2026 CIBA Booksellers' List Selection • One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

A dark fable about love and innocence and beauty in an ever darker world.

There's a city on an island in the Pacific that can only be reached by ferry, a city where a mechanic named Frank opens a garage with his old friend Charlie, and in which they each marry women they love but with whom they cannot have children. There are drugs on the streets of this city that take away pain for strings of minutes and bring synthetic rapture; and it is these streets that give each couple babies that they find abandoned under strange circumstances, babies that that they bring into their homes and raise as their own. The boy they name Daphnis, and the girl Chloe.

And so begins a book unlike anything else in Colin McAdam's oeuvre, a modern retelling of an ancient story, a dark fable about love and innocence in an even darker world. Part Ovid and part True Romance, and narrated by Eros himself, Daphnis and Chloe offers a pulpy meditation on love and beauty, of people triumphing over darkness by wrestling deep within it, of the solace of art, and of the simple but profound pleasure provided to a blind old man as he holds his wife's hand and listens to an increasingly familiar story.