Dayswork: A Novel

Praise for Dayswork: A Novel

Weird and wonderful, a novel in verse that immediately casts a spell and keeps it going until the last little missive. It’s the kind of book you miss as soon as it’s over, its sway and power nearly as mysterious and unlikely as that of a leviathan tome about whaling…[I]t brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as much as Moby-Dick.


— Chris Vognar - Boston Globe

A clever mash-up of a fictionalized memoir, a meditation on a literary forebear, and a portrait of a marriage…Dayswork is a supremely literate achievement that wears its erudition lightly.


— Heller McAlpin - Wall Street Journal

A brief, illuminating book about Melville and marriage…[T]he words seem to bob on a sea of blank white pages, the ideas come together elegantly and with a deadpan timing.
— Christine Smallwood - Washington Post

A probing story about ambition, art and marriage.
— New York Times

Masterful.
— Alice Kelly - Los Angeles Review of Books

[T]he perfect book for a subdivided brain—a lovingly curated smorgasbord of Melville arcana lightly masquerading as a pandemic novel.
— Andrew Martin - The Paris Review

Bachelder and Habel weave a deft, subtle family drama out of one woman’s obsessive immersion in the wonderful and frightening world of Herman Melville.
— Andrew Schenker - The Baffler

Surprising and revelatory and the perfect read for all lovers of literature.
— Hannah Harlow, WBUR

[W]hat makes the novel so moving…is how Bachelder and Habel distill history down into a kind of personal microcosm.
— Nicholas Russell - The Defector

Bachelder and Habel have created a curious, heady cocktail of a quarantine novel that feels like a buoyant literary memoir, a surprising and exhilarating inquiry into the pleasures and pitfalls of literature, obsession, collaboration, and love, all relayed with piquant wit and thrilling insight.
— Donna Seaman - Booklist (starred review)

A remarkable, unusually rewarding work.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)

A love letter to literature.
— Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Dayswork is a wonder. I cannot think of another book, another reading experience, entirely like this one. It is suffused with the pleasures of reading, of immersion, of companionship in all its forms.


— Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

How to describe this deeply moving and entirely original book Dayswork is at once a portrait of a marriage, a meditation on art and ambition, a pandemic novel, a middle-age comedy, a brilliant collage of Herman Melville, and a tour de force of collaborative writing. Above all, it is a love story. Out of the most difficult times and unlikely materials, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have created something that can only be described as extraordinary.


— Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping

I was equally charmed and fascinated by Dayswork, this slender but capacious book about marriage and solitude, about Melville and Hawthorne, about literature and obsession and whether they might not be the same thing. Wry, intimate, and wholly original, the novel surprised me and edified me with every page I eagerly turned.


— Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins