Yrsa Daley-Ward Discusses The Catch with Zakiya Dalia Harris

BPL Presents welcomes Yrsa Daley-Ward who discusses The Catch—named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by TIME, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, We Are Bookish, and Book Riot—in conversation with Zakiya Dalia Harris.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. 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 catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.

As with most things, Clara and Dempsey cannot see eye to eye on the confounding appearance of this woman. Clara, a celebrity author with a penchant for excessive drinking and one-night stands, is all too willing to welcome the confident and temperamental Serene into her home. But cloistered Dempsey, who makes a modest living doing menial data entry work from the confines of her apartment, is dubious of the whole situation, believing this all to be the insidious ruse of a con woman. Clashing over this stranger who burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together.

In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

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Yrsa Daley-Ward is an English writer, model, and actor. She is known for her debut book, Bone, as well as for her spoken-word poetry, and for being an Instagram poet. Her memoir, The Terrible, was published in 2018, and in 2019 it won the PEN/Ackerley Prize. Photo credit Joshua Michael Shelton

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zakiya Dalila Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her debut novel, The Other Black Girl, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is now a critically acclaimed Hulu Original Series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband. Photo credit Nicole Mondestin