Piglet: A Novel (Hardcover)

Description

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

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.

About the Author

Praise For…

“Ambitious prose Nora Ephron would be proud of. Hazell captures the subtle class divide in contemporary British life with precision—all while serving the reader a bacchanal of delicious food writing that will have you craving more.”
—Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

“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

“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

“This book! Visceral, brilliantly dark, and so smart. An object lesson in how our relentless pursuit of a tickbox life will never make us happy. Characters that pop, writing you could eat.”
—Fran Littlewood, New York Times Bestselling author of Amazing Grace Adams