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SONGS OF NO PROVENANCE

Lydia Conklin

This literary novel tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folksinger forever on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. For readers of Torrey Peters' DETRANSATION BABY and JM Coetzee's DISGRACE.

Joan retreats to teaching teenagers at a writing camp in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary cartoonist. This character study of a flawed and fascinating artist explores issues of trans and nonbinary identity, queer appropriation, fame, cancel culture, and how to make art without ego. Lydia Conklin was a Stegner Fellow and has received multiple awards, grants and fellowships. Their fiction is published in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and other publications. Their first collection of stories, RAINBOW RAINBOW, was published by Catapult Books in the USA and Simon & Schuster in the UK.

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Book Published 2025-06-03 by Catapult

Comments

UK: Chatto & Windus

Lydi Conklin's protagonist Joan is unforgettable, a raw-voiced indie musician whose persona is tougher than her heart, and who struggles to understand her own complex identity. This bold, funny, moving novel follows Joan through wild upheaval to unexpected and exhilarating reconciliation.

With emotional precision, an endlessly captivating antiheroine, and surprises at every turn, the radical and profound Songs of No Provenance explores the unruliness of desire, the insatiable need to create, and the truth we owe to ourselves and to those we love. Lydi Conklin is one of my favorite writers and I can't wait for the world to discover their singular vision.

This novel is a wild ride! A ribald romp asking profound questions about art-making, kink, self-deception, repair, and grace. Joan Vole is an unforgettable character and Lydi Conklin is a daring, delightful writer. I'll read anything they write.

Lydi Conklin has gathered up slippery ideas about art-making and desire and mentorship and gender and plunged an antihero for the ages through the heart of them all. Songs of No Provenance is a raw, empathetic novel of exceptional power.

Thrilling and utterly engrossing, this is an extraordinary debut from a writer endlessly astute about shame, harm, the possibility of repair, and the complexities of ambition. Reading Songs of No Provenance, I thought of D.W. Winnicott saying, 'It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.' Conklin's novel helps light paths to lead readers out of hiding.

Joan Vole is an indelible character, flawed and contradictory and utterly compelling. She is the beating heart of Songs of No Provenance, an expansive novel about ambition and art, love and transgression. Lydi Conklin writes with verve, precision, and the kind of tenderness that takes your breath away.

Songs of No Provenance is an unflinching masterpiece of transgressive empathy. Mining the rawest margins of shame and accountability, Conklin's visceral prose is able to hold even the thorniest facets of human experience with tendernesswhich lets us get close enough to see the complex, redemptive possibilities only intimacy (and Conklin's skill) can make visible. This brilliant debut novel is a testimony: the very aspects of ourselves we fear wall us off from othersour kinks, secrets, jealousies, failuresmay instead be doors of connection.