All Flesh
A Novel
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 28 abr 2026
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- $249.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
A ticking bomb of teenage savagery that blows the hypocrisies and prejudice of society to smithereens.
Bullied at school with near-hellish doggedness by cold-hearted classmates and fattened at home with increasingly extravagant feasts by an overindulgent father, the voracious narrator of All Flesh trudges through her teen years certain that her heft is because she has absorbed her twin sister in utero and is now eating, and living, for two.
As those around her look down on her corpulence, she struggles to see who she might be beyond such narrow-mindedness. When a near-fatal incident unexpectedly brings a man and a heady experience of the body’s other pleasures into her life, she gets a decadent taste of a future she had never dared to imagine. But she is beset once more by sharp tongues and beady eyes until, finally, she devises a drastic way to turn the tables on her tormentors and the whole unjust world. But will her coup de grâce prove self-possessed, or self-destructive?
In All Flesh, Ananda Devi’s keenly lyrical prose presents a darkly humorous mirror that bitingly reflects and shatters the double standards around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, and food, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies humanity’s excesses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the beginning of this sensual and provocative novel by Mauritian writer Devi (Eye Out of Her Ruins), the unnamed but unforgettable narrator announces she's about to livestream her own "sacrifice." Exactly what this means is only revealed near the end. First, the narrator, who, at 16, weighs more than 400 pounds, flashes back to her gestation in her mother's womb, claiming that she consumed her twin sister before her birth. Overwhelmed by the baby's exceptional size (her birth weight was 22 pounds and eight ounces), the mother struggles to keep up with breastfeeding and abandons her not long after weaning. The narrator is then raised by her father, a food writer who slavishly indulges her with delicious meals. Her father also insists on addressing her as if she were two people, herself and her "disappeared twin," claiming he has "two beautiful daughters." She "play along, even though it was no game," and wryly observes that she "didn't know that schizophrenia could be forced upon us." Many painful scenes ensue, including a brief and heartbreaking reunion with her mother. After the narrator turns 16, she supplements her "morbid" and "orgasmic" eating with a life-affirming indulgence: a sexual relationship with a 30-something carpenter who seems to love her for who she is. From here, the narrative hurtles through a series of striking twists, driven in part by the pesky inner voice of the narrator's twin sister. An epigraph from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer sets the carnal and gleefully filthy tone, and Devi never lets up. The reader won't be able to look away from this singular work.
