Barbara

From the author of Double Teenage and Talking Animals comes an intimate portrait of a woman losing and finding her identity through the business and art of moviemaking.

Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward.

She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire’s victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love.

An intense, layered distillation of a zeitgeist, Joni Murphy’s latest novel whispers tales of independent cinema and grimy show business, militarism and physics, bomb making and image consumption. It is a study of the mirroring and splitting between old and new worlds, inner sensations, and outward performance. Ultimately, Barbara unspools a delicate yet propulsive tale of a woman grasping for a meaningful life amid the reflective, broken shards of the long 20th century.

Press Coverage

25 books to read in 2025 —Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Toronto Star

“Murphy’s fragmented narrative considers an era of aimlessness. ‘The myth of time flowing,’ she writes, ‘it changed this century.’ With a singularly unmoored voice, she offers an intimate portrait of a woman—and a generation of artists—fractured by war and its aftermath.” —Literary Review of Canada

Writer’s Block: Joni Murphy —All Lit Up

“The story she tells is at once her own and that of the 20th century, a personal tale refracted through an era of technological and scientific advancement, burgeoning consumerism, artistic experimentation, and war… In Barbara, the intimate takes place alongside the world-historical.” —Marisa Grizenko, The Ex-Puritan

“Barbara is fascinating… Murphy has created such a compelling character that you need to keep reading.” —Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

Shelf Life Books discusses our April Book of the Month: Barbara by Joni Murphy —Book Storm podcast

About the Author

Joni Murphy was born in New Mexico lives in New York. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was named one of The Globe and Mail‘s 100 Best Books of 2016. Her second novel, Talking Animals, was published in 2020.

Genre
Literary Fiction / Historical Fiction

5.25 x 8 inches
248 pages

Binding
Softcover, perfect-bound

ISBN
9781771669252