A Best Book of the Year in HARPER’S BAZAAR, BBC, THE NEW YORKER, GLAMOUR, GAL-DEM and HUFFPOST
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi and ramen, onigiri and udon - the food her Japanese father liked to eat - but the only thing she can digest is blood. Yet Lydia can't bring herself to prey on humans, and sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her Malaysian-British mother for the first time and trying to build a career as an artist - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.
If Lydia is to find a way to exist in the world, she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans. Before any of this, however, she must eat.
Woman, eating by Claire Kohda
Claire Kohda is an English-Japanese author and musician. Her debut novel, Woman, Eating, was a book of the year in Harper’s Bazaar, the New Yorker, Glamour, BBC and HuffPost. She also contributed an essay to the East Side Voices anthology, and a short story to the Virago anthology Furies; her writing has also appeared in the Guardian, TLS, FT and NYT. As a violinist, she has played with artists including Sigur Ros, The National and Max Richter, and on film soundtracks such as The Two Popes, The Matrix Resurrections and Tar.