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4.0 

Dayspring

By Anthony Oliveira
Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS • One of Indigo's Top 10 Literary Fiction Books of 2024 and Top 100 Books of 2024 • One of CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024

A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.


There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild.

In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved—his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound.

Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life.

Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, Dayspring is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse.

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99 Reviews

4.0
“This is Jesus and the beloved disciple at their most intemporal and eternal. It is a love story - of Jesus and his beloved, of the Christ and humanity, of God and his universe - that stretches beyond time itself. I found myself made speechless by the beauty and sorrow of the world Anthony Oliveira has created. Dayspring has those qualities of an epic poem, commanding that it must be enjoyed in pieces and morsels, even just one page at a time. It demands to be consumed and then consumed again, reread and revisited with new eyes. I took a long break halfway through reading, and smaller breaks periodically, to ruminate upon this book. When I reread it, I am sure that different passages will sing to me, will be imbued with new meaning. This will certainly remain with me for a long time.”
“nobody is allowed to talk to me about the aesthetics of catholicism until they’ve read this book. wowee i think i might be religious and i understand the holy spirit in a way that wasn’t true before this book? this was so meticulous in every (blushing) detail and it was like, genuinely a life changing read. to put divine love in the context of human, romantic, gay love, to put the new testament in the new world. and the support from other poets! i hope that i return to this in 20 years and am both just as moved and experiencing 1/5 of the shock because i want more like this. all other religious and gay poems will have to fight to not be in the shadow of dayspring.”

About Anthony Oliveira

Anthony Oliveira is a National Magazine and GLAAD Award-winning author, film programmer, pop culture critic, podcaster, and PhD living in Toronto.

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