Sam’s Orchid
A hypnotic novel of desire, memory, and the strange afterlife of cinema .
From two-time Trillium Book Prize finalist Daniel Soha comes Sam’s Orchid, a richly layered literary work that blurs the lines between fiction and memory, glamour, and grief.
Told in dual registers, a “moral tale” wrapped in historical fiction and a candid autobiographical essay, the novel unspools the life and myth of Samantha Chadwick, a mesmerizing but forgotten actress whose career was launched—and derailed— by a single scandalous film.
Obsessed with Sam’s image and haunted by a film that never should have existed, Péter, a Hungarian-American professor and cinephile, embarks on a transcontinental quest to uncover the truth of her life. Their meeting in a Milan café becomes the entry point into a world where movies shape memory, reality is fluid, and desire—both fulfilled and thwarted—leaves lasting scars.
Set against the backdrop of post-war Europe, underground cinema, and bohemian London, Sam’s Orchid is part erotic reverie, part philosophical inquiry, and part ode to the strange immortality that film can bestow. It’s also a story of reckoning— of men with their past, and of women with the roles the world casts them in.
With nods to Alberto Moravia, Fellini, and the erotic mythos of the 1970s and 80s, Soha crafts a haunting meditation on love, loss, and the dangerous beauty of the screen.
Includes an epilogue essay: “Georges Cardona and the Enigma of the Stolen Movie – When the New Wave Refused to Die.”
“Sam's Orchid is a tour de force, providing as it does deeply intellectual/historical perceptions of pop culture and, in particular, porn through a tightly-controlled narrative. In my view, Soha is a writer and thinker of the first rank, and my interest in what he has to say rarely flags. […] The novel is at the same time expansive and self-contained and doesn't need any introductory material to set up or introduce its character studies or themes. Sam's story, and that of her paramour(s) is consistently compelling and rarely repetitive. […] I will say that, for the most part, Soha handles gender issues quite skillfully, no easy task given the gap between the periods in which Sam's art and life unwind and his own, more contemporary position as a writer.”
J. Andrew Wainwright
Writer and scholar