An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all.
Eating disorders.
Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.
But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.
A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.
Don't just take our word for it...
“That sumptuous cheeseburger on the cover is feast enough, but Piglet has so much more to offer within its short, compulsively readable pages. . . . Delicious, in every sense of the word.”
– Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle
“It takes audacity and all kinds of courage to produce a novel as ferocious and weird as Piglet. The narrative accelerates like nothing else I’ve read, opening onto dead-end domestic conformity and then driving us all the way out into the wildernesses, where the possibility for liberation and the fulfillment of desires might be discovered. It made me so hungry.”
—Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear
“Piglet is luscious and disturbing and propulsive, and I completely devoured it. It’s a book about hunger and secrecy and women made small by convention. And it’s a book that tears at the surface of things to reveal the vast, messy truth of a body with a beating heart.”
– Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things
Taste the very first page
98 Days
Piglet was sweating, and the supermarket chill was welcome on her breastbone, her back. Waitrose was full: shiny four-by-fours filling the car park, Saturday-morning shoppers with reusable bags jostling in the aisles.
Oxford was at the end of a heat wave, the novelty of sun- warmed skin worn, and the city was coated in the kind of grime that accumulated in weeks without rain. Outside, Piglet had watched from behind her sunglasses as a man and woman screamed at each other through their open car windows about a parking space.
Even in the cool sanctuary of the supermarket, the mood was irascible. A woman wearing Birkenstocks and ecru-coloured linen pushed past Piglet, reaching for a pecorino.
But guests would be arriving at six, and she didn’t have time to seethe among the cheeses. As she shopped, her fiancé, Kit…
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