Woman, Eating
'Absolutely brilliant - Kohda takes the vampire trope and makes it her own' Ruth Ozeki
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- 4,49 €
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- 4,49 €
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year in HARPER'S BAZAAR, BBC, THE NEW YORKER, GLAMOUR, GAL-DEM and HUFFPOST
'Witty and thought-provoking' Stylist
'Blistering' Glamour
'Unusual, original and strikingly contemporary' Guardian
'Absolutely brilliant' Ruth Ozeki
'A gripping contemporary fable about embracing difference' The Times
'A wholly 21st century take on bloodsucking' Observer
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.
'It's Kohda's exploration of Lydia's inner world, the pain and longing she feels as an outsider, that makes Woman, Eating such a delicious novel' New York Times Book Review
'A profound meditation on alienation and appetite, and what it means to be a young woman who experiences life at an acute level of intensity and awareness' LISA HARDING
'What Stoker did for the vampire at the end of the nineteenth century, Claire Kohda does for for it in our own era' TLS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kohda's delicious debut introduces a young performance artist whose centuries-old mother made her into a vampire as an infant. Lydia, 23, was raised on her mother Julie's self-hating rhetoric and Julie's belief that they "didn't deserve to feel satiated." Her human father, who was a famous Japanese artist, died before her birth, leaving Lydia feeling isolated from both her Japanese and human heritage. When Julie's declining memory makes assisted living necessary, Lydia sets out on her own with a new art studio space in London—unsure whether to continue following her mother's regimen, which called for pig's blood instead of human. Kohda gets off to a slow start, plodding through Lydia's move into her studio and an unfulfilling internship at a gallery. But things pick up after Lydia's store of pig's blood runs out and she begins compulsively watching #WhatIEatInADay videos. Here, Kodha palpably conveys Lydia's disconnection from the human experiences she so desperately wants, and after Lydia takes her first taste of human blood (from a towel used to clean up after a bike accident), she instantly feels all-powerful. The pace quickens, bounding toward a thrilling end, as Lydia questions whether to run from or honor her legacy. Once this gets going, it's great fun.
