Epic and Lovely: A Novel

by Mo Daviau

Overview

Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.

Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959000624
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2025
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave,which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Daviau lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a bookseller.

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a love bomb, a love bloom, a love letter from a soul on the edge of death who talks back, cracks wise, and throws down wisdom. Daviau reminds us that death always kisses birth, living always births dying, crying keeps us whole, and laughter is good medicine. I swooned." 
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves and The Chronology of Water

"Mo Daviau’s Epic and Lovely is a novel that manages the startling feat of being at once deeply intimate and thrillingly grand. Taking on motherhood, mortality, disability, and seemingly everything else under the California sun—tech billionaires and Vegas lounge singers, age gaps and abusers—Daviau’s heartbreaking novel fully earns its title’s fitting descriptors. Epic and Lovely is wonderful from end to end." 
—Matthew Specktor, author of The Golden Hour and Always Crashing in the Same Car

"Full of tenderness, dark humor, and aching vulnerability, Mo Daviau has written a stunning novel that asks how we choose to be remembered when our stories reach their inevitable conclusion. Illuminating the complicated intersection of bodily autonomy and parental love, Epic and Lovely is a meditation on inheritance—both genetic and emotional—that deftly explores what it means to leave behind a legacy when time is running out."
—-Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

“Daviau is such a talented prose writer. Uproariously funny, singeing, authoritative. This is a skillful, sophisticated author writing with a scalpel on every line, willing to go to wild places. Somehow we’re in the territory of farce, of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and of Eyes Wide Shut, all at the same time.” 
—Courtney Sender, author of In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories

“In Epic and Lovely, Mo Daviau pushes against our expectations of the chronically ill. It’s a fully rendered look at chronic illness and difficult choices. Darkly funny and driven by the voice of Nina, whose voice is in turns sardonic, quirky, smart, and vulnerable, Epic and Lovely challenges our ideas about what it means to be sick in the modern world.” 
—Renée K. Nicholson, coeditor of Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine
 

From the Publisher

2025-07-17
In a letter to the chosen mother of her newborn child, a woman with a rare disorder looks back at her lifetime search for love after the early loss of her father and her wild last year.

In Daviau’s second novel, Nina Simone Blaine addresses Dr. Tabitha Chen, who diagnosed Nina with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome when Nina was 11 years old, and whom Nina has chosen to be the adoptive mother of the newborn she calls Sigrid Alma. Forty years and six weeks old, Nina expects to die within hours of giving birth to the child she never expected to have. Like “Marfan on steroids,” A12 endows its carriers—most of them the children of men older than 60—with missing fingers, bulging eyes, loose skin, crooked bodies, troubled hearts, and early deaths. For Nina, A12 meant rejection by her mother, Tracy, a former beauty queen who took her second husband’s side rather than her daughter’s in a sexual assault court case; when she was a girl, only Nina’s father, Eddie Blaine, who died when she was 7, called her beautiful. Once known as Sandy Blattner, Eddie gave up crooning on the Catskills circuit to attempt stardom in Hollywood and left behind a few mostly forgotten albums and Nina’s memory of his love. Seeking affection as devoted as her father’s sends Nina from her home in Connecticut back to Los Angeles and into the arms of Cole Courchaine, one of the “Good Thumbs,” a small circle of people with A12 supporting each other through their last days. Cole is grandiose, manipulative, and violent; given his grotesquely abusive behavior, Nina’s entanglement with him can be hard to take. The novel’s conclusion is both celebratory and satisfying in its ambiguities, as most of its large cast of characters are revealed to be complicated, capable of a flawed kind of love, and, with few exceptions, also somewhat mean.

A dark and complex exploration of the vagaries of parental and romantic love.

Kirkus Reviews