Esther, the Butcher

“I loved every minute of this grotesque, insanely original gut punch.”—Ainslie Hogarth, author of Strange Harm

Already an international sensation, this brilliantly grotesque, hauntingly surreal, and instantly gripping literary debut features one of the most intense voices of recent fiction: a young woman whose love for animal butchery is matched only by her desire to have a baby

All day, Esther slaughters. It’s the only job she’s ever done; it’s the only job she wants to do.

For Esther, life is simple and beautiful. She has no dreams of leaving the place she was born, an industrial town dwarfed by a massive meat factory. As a baby, Esther was weaned on aspic and sausage, and as a teenager she loved nothing more than working at her parents’ butcher shop, digging her hand into a tub of freshly ground minced meat and imagining her own body as flesh that someone might one day touch as lovingly. As an adult, Esther’s life falls perfectly into place: she obtains her dream job in the Factory’s slaughterhouse, then snags a middle-class husband, an artificial inseminator of sows at the town’s pig farm. There is only one thing missing: a child.

Esther longs deeply for the time when she will create flesh of her own flesh, but try as the couple do, she does not fall pregnant. Parental pressure mounts, and Esther’s small town pulses with rumor as her coworkers stare openly at her unswelling belly. But Esther’s body is hiding secrets of which even she is unaware—her flesh is not weak, and her spirit even stronger.

Influenced by Franz Kafka and with the freshness and intensity of Sayaka Murata and Olga Tokarczuk, Mariia Niskavaara takes her place as one of the most exciting young voices to come out of Europe in recent years. A tender master of the surreal, she shows us the extreme reality of womanhood under contemporary capitalism and asks the thought-provoking question: are we really anything more than meat?