2.5

Clara and Dempsey are twins whose mother died when they were babies. Clara is now a successful author who was brought up in a loving home. Dempsey struggles with life. She is unemployed and sees a therapist. She was adopted by Kendrick, whose parenting skills were minimal at best. The twins barely saw each other during their childhoods and Clara appears to despise her less beautiful and accomplished twin.

However, one day Clara is in a high street store and sees a woman steal an expensive watch. She follows the woman home - not because of the watch but because she resembles their mother. Unfortunately Dempsey believes that the woman, who Clara has befriended and bears the same name as their mother, is either a ghost or a con woman.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the twins' lives now begin to resemble Clara's latest book, Evidence, which is all about their mother.

The Catch begins as a book where the characters are merely trying to find out if the woman is their mother, but as it continues, the story becomes more bewildering and falls under the magical realism genre. In its second half the entire book becomes a spiral of Clara and Dempsey trying to find out if the woman is their mother, who their father is and if they take any action what will happen to them?

I found the book increasingly bewildering and by the end it almost felt that the author had lost their grip on the narrative and didn't know where to stop. I was simply relieved to reach the end. The actual writing was good and the characters were believable though and I'd try more of this author's work that wasn't set in the same genre.

If you like magical realism and don't mind being utterly bewildered, you'll love this. Perhaps fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez would enjoy it. I'm afraid it wasn't for me.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the advance review copy.

While the prose in The Catch is undeniably lyrical and rich, I found it hard to stay engaged. The story is quite ambiguous - I was often confused about what was actually happening and kept feeling like I’d missed something. Maybe that’s a me problem as I usually prefer speculative elements to be more clearly defined or anchored in the narrative.

I also found the characters frustrating - they seemed to cycle through toxic, repetitive behaviours with little sense of growth, which made it hard to connect with them or feel invested in their relationships.

I think some readers will really connect with the mood and style of this book, but it didn’t really work for me. That said, I do think Daley-Ward is a talented writer and I’d be happy to give her other works a try.

Magical realism and some … Yrsa Daley-Ward knows how to mess with your mind to astonishing effect. The energy behind her writing is addictive, as is the scope of the content. The style makes for compulsive reading. The plot is so clever, ambiguous, dark, darkly inexplicable, mysterious, and leaves the reader with myriad questions – time travel? Parallel worlds? Personality disorders and mental confusion? Sibling rivalry? Abuse, drug addiction, fame, alcoholic confusion … it is an amazing read.

I had mixed feelings about Yrsa Daley-Ward's memoir, The Terrible; I admired her prose and her brave exploration of her traumatic childhood growing up with Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents in north-west England, but struggled with the increasingly frequent fragments of prose-poetry as she moved into her teens. Thankfully, The Catch, her debut novel, is written pretty much entirely in prose, and it's a much stronger showcase for Daley-Ward's talent. Its premise is beautifully eerie and the way it plays out throughout the novel is even eerier. Clara, on the cusp of literary fame, glimpses a woman her own age who looks exactly like her dead mother. Indeed, Clara is convinced that the woman actually is her mother, even though her less-fortunate, socially awkward twin sister Dempsey thinks she's gone mad. As Clara hunts down the mysterious woman, she wanders into a flat that looks exactly like the one in the few faded photographs she has of her mother: 'Through the glass I notice the burnt amber walls of the photo... I have lived or at least dreamed this, the knowing hue of the place, the honey wood of the floor'. This hallucinatory novel wanders between a more solid many-worlds conceit and something that feels more metaphorical; somehow, Daley-Ward manages to keep it grounded until she allows herself to float off, magnificently, at the very end. It's a brilliant way to explore the strained relationship between the sisters, who were brought up in different adoptive families after their mother's death, and the way they mourn their mother's lost potential. I appreciated the freshness of a book about motherhood from the point of view of the daughters, as well, emphasising that the strength of the love we feel for our parents can be as fathomless as what parents feel for their children, even if it plays out differently. I wanted this to be just a tad more spec-fic rather than lit-fic, but it's a great, original debut.

A surreal, complex story of duality, creativity and family. Can you realise your potential as a mother, as a sister, as a creative, as a woman in society? Daley-Ward probes these questions in the most uncanny of setups. Twin sisters meet their maybe-mother who disappeared 30 years ago and reappears the same age. Is she real? Is she a ghost? Is she a con woman? As the sisters investigate the mystery, they confront and reckon with their pasts. Highly original. Felt like reading an equally strange but slightly more accessible Helen Oyeyemi.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.

This is honestly one of those rare occasions where a book leaves me confused and conflicted on how I am feeling about it — not necessarily in a negative way, I think? I will start by saying I think the writing style is really great, interesting and makes the story particularly engaging. I think both sisters were very well written and interesting to follow, even though they were both very unreliable narrators, which I usually love. I did find the story to be overall a little confusing, and I am still not sure I actually know what I read? But it definitely is such a fun, charming read, and it does its job keeping you hooked all the way through.

This book is a multitude of things and difficult to confine to a single genre. The unreliable narrator robs you of certainty; at first, it takes a moment to settle into the story. However, once you’re in the flow of reading, you begin to question the legitimacy of what you’re being told. Truth becomes an abstract concept, whether events are accurate, a character’s subjective perception, or a figment of their imagination. You’re left wondering whether the characters are even real or merely sublimations of someone or something else entirely.

Clara, the chosen twin, is to me irredeemable. She embodies the archetype of the unlikeable female character. I appreciated her unrestrained awfulness; even as her relationship with Dempsey developed, my perception of her did not change.

Dempsey, by contrast, is lost, searching for something or someone to ground her. Between her health obsession, Dr Rayna, and the retreat, she evokes sympathy and displays a level of evolution that her twin does not.

The climax feels earned, though not straightforward. There is an openness to it that allows the reader plenty of room to either decide or speculate on what actually happened, who is real and who is not.

At first, I thought Serene had replaced the twins in the current timeline, in a “only one of us can survive” sort of vein. I came across a review that cited Beloved, which I found to be a particularly interesting comparison. Alternatively, perhaps the twins were simply conjured by Serene and never existed at all. I am still unsure, and perhaps that is the point, especially if the novel is intended to portray borderline personality disorder. The events are circular, and we end where we began. Serene is pregnant, and the story begins again. What came first, the hen or the egg?

At times, certain details felt tangential, while others, such as Clara’s anger, were not given enough weight and came across as throwaway. However, the book’s liminal nature allows it to get away with these ambiguities.

The structure contributes to the overall uncertainty. The novel plays into its own confusion and metaphysical qualities, suggesting that everything and nothing can be true at once. I felt the book was heading towards something profound.

Ultimately, I am unsure how I feel about this book, as the distortion of reality is never definitively resolved.
Overall, the book felt strangely familiar, in a way that is difficult to articulate. 3.75-4

I’m sorry, what? What was that? (I only finished it out of respect for the publisher.)

They say to start with the good. There were a couple of paragraphs I liked in "The Catch", and generally, the book was easy to read (but not easy to follow). For a long while, I thought it would get better, that it would deserve its stars. But… it was bad.

I’m so angry about all the time I wasted on this. It’s complicated, messy, pointless, uninteresting, boring, and full of characters I did not care about. It tries so hard to be clever, but my gosh, it is not! There are so many important topics being brushed on and, what felt like disrespectfully, scattered aside.

There are so many wonderful, engrossing, captivating books out there. This is not one of them. Very disappointed.

Ms Daley- Ward isn't an author I've heard of before, but reading her online biography she sounds like a really interesting person and I was looking forward to reading this book. I really enjoyed the first third or so, the writing style and dark humour appealed to me as did the character's descriptions and relationships. Then I really struggled with the "plot" and what was happening. I'm quite happy to tease out complex and possibly other worldly narratives that spiral back into themselves, but at some point the writer needs to help ground the reader or at least shed some clarity on what they are trying to convey, but sadly I was left wondering and ultimately not caring what was going on.
Thank you to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.
2.5 stars rounded up to 3

I was captivated throughout but also entirely lost whilst reading this. The prose clearly illustrates Daley-Ward's poetic style and was absolutely stunning in several places but like a poem I felt like half the time I had absolutely no clue what was going on.

Both Clara and Dempsey were proven to be unreliable narrators and their narration as well as their actions didn't seem to fit with that of a 30-year old. Their narration did create a sort of "twisted sisters" atmosphere that helped to keep the story murky and unclear which, once you realise there is also a theme of mental illness starts to make more sense.

Personally, I don't think the blurb does this book justice. The main plot points were there but the actual novel itself had so much more going on and wasn't at all what I expected. I will definitely return to this in the hopes that a re-read might help me spot things I missed in the first read and make more sense of some of the more confusing elements of the time travel storyline.

The Catch is an unusual and original novel, that starts like a conventional story then twists the reader round so that we’re not quite sure where we are. Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poet’s sense of language makes this a beautiful read and her clever storytelling shifts our allegiance between the three main characters. We are rooting for one and then the next in turn. The magic of the events in the book feels quite real (of course Selene is the twins’ mother, never mind that they are the same age!). In amongst the dizzying, narrative, themes of self-actualisation, motherhood, black womanhood swirl and resonate. Focusing on the time travelling, clever overlapping timelines and lives could negate the fact that this is also a fun and funny read. The best kind of page turner.

(3.5 rounded up)

The prose on this book was like poetry at points, I loved that the twisty vibes were woven into the text as well as throughout the plot, and I also adored the cyclical nature of the story - you could see the pattern followed forever.

I do think it was a little confusing - despite my love of the writing, I don’t think there was ever a point where I fully grasped what was happening or why. There is a point where things are starting to make sense, and a plan is developed, but it still isn’t explained why or how any of this is happening. Though this didn’t stop me enjoying the story as I was reading, it did take me a little longer to get into and it has left me with a lot of questions that I don’t think I can answer.

I love an unreliable narrator, so I loved the way the story was told through two of them, though they were frustrating at times! I enjoyed the meta references and the chapters of the characters book being dispersed through. This is a really well told story and I enjoyed reading it, despite coming away feeling like I still don’t really know what happened.

This would be a great book to read with a book club, I can see so much discussion that could be had around it. The confusion actually lends itself to this well; nothing is ever set in stone, so there are so many theories that could be crafted around it and so many different interpretations. This would honestly be a fantastic book to discuss with others.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for my ARC in return for an honest review ♥️

i wasn’t sure what to expect going into the catch, but wow - this was an entertaining, super trippy ride. i fell in love with the writing style from the get-go; it was poetic and evocative, infused with a dark, dry humour. the story itself took unexpected twists and turns, and while i wasn’t entirely sure what had truly gone down by the final page, i still had an enjoyable time. this isn’t a “no plot, just vibes” read, but the vibes were immaculate and kept me engaged.

the plot surrounds two twin sisters, clara and dempsey, whose lives are thrown into upheaval when one day clara spots their long presumed dead mother, serene, in a department store. not only that, but serene appears to be 30 years old - the same age as the twins. the wildness only begins there, because the journey we’re taken on is trippy and confusing and science fiction-y, told through the perspectives of two unreliable narrators. there were so many unexpected elements, and by the end, i kept questioning what i had read, what was real and what wasn’t. i mean this all in the best way, though. it wasn’t a frustrating kind of confusion, or the confusion that arises when an author just doesn’t know what story they’re trying to tell. it was all very much intentional, and it made for one of the most interesting reading experiences i’ve had in a while.

the characters were great, particularly clara and dempsey. i loved the characterisation of the twins who, because of being split up in the care system, ended up on two completely different life paths. there is a scene where serene observes the similarities between the twins, and clara mishears her when she says they share the same ears as them sharing the same fears. that honestly sums the sisters up very well because, even though they are different and, for the most part, estranged, they are also equally traumatised by the loss of their mother under the circumstances, the lack of knowledge about their father, and growing up in adoptive families that were abusive in different ways. this was explored while keeping clara and dempsey feeling like two very distinct characters, and i thought that was amazing. serene was a lot more enigmatic, and i still don’t know what to make of her, but i thought she played off the two sisters brilliantly, and it was cool how her presence affected them in different ways.

the writing absorbed me in from page one. it was poetic on the page, yet accessible, and i fell in love. the way it was used to explore the darker themes, such as the twins’ depressive thoughts, was perfect. i would love to read another book from yrsa daley-ward just to experience more of her writing.

and can i just end by saying the covers are stunning? both for my edition and the alternate cover i’ve seen, they’re both gorgeous and encapsulate the vibe of the book perfectly. and this is such a weird thing to bring up as well, but i loved the typeface in the book 😭 especially the title headings, i was obsessed for some reason. amazing all round.

overall, i’m so glad i got to read the catch. while the dazed and disorienting narrative may not be for everyone, i really hope it gets positive feedback once it comes out this summer. i’ll personally be keeping an eye out for more from yrsa daley-ward, and i may even grab myself a physical copy of the catch when i can. massive thanks to Cornerstone, Merky Books and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review!

Rating at 3.5-4☆

Where to begin?
This was a dark, twisty and often confusing story, but in a good way. I might not have always known what was real, but it certainly pulled me in, needing to read on in my bid to find out more. (I actually finished it in just over 24hrs).It certainly ticks the box for fans of dysfunctional families, and other world timelines. It's full of emotion, it will keep you on your toes, and it's one that I know will stick with me for a while. It's not one I can see myself reading multiple times, but I may read it again, if only to try and pin down what actually happened.

This just wasn't for me - I couldn't work out what was going on and I could not connect with the style of writing. In the first part the character refers to the body she is inhabiting - what? Is she a spirit? Maybe I am just too literal and lack an imagination but I cut my losses and started another book.

Clara and Dempsey are twins, but by no means does that make their personalities identical. But one thing that connects them on the deepest of levels is the shared trauma they have experienced and the ways in which they deal with the lifelong affect of this too.

The Catch really is such a beautifully written story that delves deep into the characters backgrounds and follows their personal growth as the story progresses. The storyline itself is captivating and emotional, something that had me unable to put the book down at the best of times.

I really did adore this story, and I have no doubt that others will too. I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future!.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Merkey Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s novel is a haunting, beautifully written story about twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who couldn’t be more different—yet are bound by the same unresolved pain. After their mother, Serene, disappears into the Thames, their relationship fractures, leaving them estranged as adults. But when Clara spots a woman who looks exactly like their mother—unchanged, untouched by time, and living a life without children—their fragile peace shatters. Clara, a celebrity author hungry for answers, is convinced it’s her. Dempsey, withdrawn and skeptical, thinks it’s a scam. Their clash over this mysterious woman forces them to confront the past they’ve been running from.

Daley-Ward’s writing is spellbinding—every sentence feels deliberate, every line weighted with meaning, but never at the expense of the story. This isn’t just a book about plot; it’s a deep, almost hypnotic dive into the sisters’ psyches, their grief, and the ways trauma shapes us. The prose is lush but never overdone, blending magical realism with raw emotional truth. It’s the kind of book you’ll want to reread just to catch the layers you missed the first time.

The relationship between Clara and Dempsey is the heart of the story—two sides of the same coin, one bright and searching, the other guarded and self-contained. Their dynamic feels real, messy, and painfully human. The novel asks: What does it mean to lose a mother? What does it mean to need one? And how do we reconcile the versions of her that exist in our heads with the reality?

That said, this isn’t a book for everyone. The tone is dark, the pacing deliberate, and if you’re looking for something fast and easy, this might not be it. The ending picks up speed, but the journey is more about atmosphere and emotion than twists.

For fans of lyrical, thought-provoking fiction—especially stories about complicated mothers and daughters, sibling bonds, and the ways trauma lingers—this book is unforgettable. Daley-Ward doesn’t just tell a story; she pulls you into a world where grief is alive, where the past is never really past, and where healing is as messy as the hurt that came before it.

I’ll definitely be coming back to this one. Some books you read once; others, you live inside for a while. This is the second kind.

A book I found personally difficult to really get into. Dark writing about twin sisters who try to see if there supposed mother has come back from the dead in a revised form.

The ongoing saga comes to a fast paced ending.

The twins Clara and Dempsey, who are like the moon and the sun, but two sides of the same coin in some ways: they are united in their trauma.
Daley-Ward writes magically - every sentence, every dialogue feels accounted for, but she also does not write from a style-only approach. The writing works together with the plot.
Plot? This is more of an exploration of the characters in a profound way and in-depth.
Absolutely loved it.
I will revisit parts of this book to a) enjoy the story and the prose, b) to confirm if I had understood what was happening right.
I highly recommend this to those who look for stories about mother-children, mother-daughters, siblings with different and even conflicting personalities, trauma, a magical realistic take on trauma and mental health problems coupled with amazing prose.