"Vampire fiction, but not as you know it — this smart, subversive page-turner explores isolation, hunger, longing to belong, and what it means to be human with biting style."
Funny, unsettling and searingly affecting Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating is a devour-in-one-sitting kind of novel. A feverish feast of female-centred fiction that explores our fundamental yearning to belong, and our complex relationship with food, hunger and our bodies through a brilliantly-bold, freshly-told twist on vampire tales.
Lydia’s vampiric condition is revealed in wry style when she rents a studio space for artists. For a few pages, her sensitivity to sun and light could be interpreted as a medical affliction, before bam! We learn of Lydia’s struggle to source fresh pigs’ blood, and that her institutionalised, centuries-old mother was responsible for turning her into the part-human, part-demon she now exists as. An existence that’s left her unbearably isolated, feeling “like my body is a puppet”, and with a complex relationship to hunger and food. While she can’t digest the kind of sustenance humans enjoy, Lydia is acutely aware of the way humans “give food a lot of power…If you lose control in your life, you can find control in your food”.
This is the first time Lydia has lived apart from her mother. Her loneliness is excruciating, and exacerbated when she meets new people at the studio and during her gallery internship. Lydia’s longing for physical and emotional closeness is palpable, as is her struggle to contain her impulse to feed herself fresh blood. Alongside this, the novel explores colonialism as vampirism — Lydia is a young British woman born to a Japanese father and a Malaysian mother whose father was “a white British man who had arrived in Malaysia as part of a colonising power. He ate many women, but for some reason had her drink from him so she would become what he was”. Such questions around identity and an intense sense of hunger sear through this uniquely powerful novel.
| Primary Genre | Horror and Supernatural Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
'Absolutely brilliant - tragic, funny, eccentric . . . Claire Kohda takes the vampire trope and makes it her own' RUTH OZEKI
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of this. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.
Then there are the humans: the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men who follow her after dark, and Ben, a goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them.
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 features in the following genres: Horror and Supernatural Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Mythical creatures: Vampires, werewolves and other shapeshifters, Contemporary horror and ghost stories, Fiction, General Fiction, Mythical, legendary and supernatural beings, monsters and creatures, Unexplained phenomena / the paranormal, Mind, body, spirit, Health & Fitness, Books of the Month, Recommendations
Woman, Eating is available in Paperback, Hardback, Ebook
Woman, Eating was written by Claire Kohda and published by Virago Press Ltd an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group
Woman, Eating has 248 pages
£9.89
.jpg)
