Season to Taste
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A startling debut about the extraordinary end of a marriage and its very strange aftermath.
Meet Lizzie Prain. She is an ordinary housewife and lives with her lovely dog and her husband, who is a bit of a difficult fellow, in a quiet cottage in British country side. She's a wonderful cook. She enjoys her garden. And, occasionally, she makes cakes for the village parties.
No one has seen Lizzie's husband, Jacob, for a few days. That's because last Monday and Lizzie snapped and cracked him on the head with her garden shovel. No one quite misses Jacob though, and Lizzie surely didn't kill him on purpose. And now that she has the chance to live beyond his shadow, she won't neglect her good fortune. Over the course of the following month, with a body to get rid of and few fail-proof options at hand, Lizzie will channel her most practical instincts and do what she does best: she'll cook Jacob, and she'll eat him.
But when Lizzie inadvertently befriends an isolated misfit, she will be tested: Will Lizzie turn to this new person for solace and abandon her desperate plan or will her new friend be an unwitting accessory to her crime? Dark, unexpectedly funny, and achingly human, Season to Taste is a deliciously subversive treat. In Lizzie Prain, Natalie Young has created one of the most remarkable and surprising heroines in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Young's deliciously dark follow-up to We All Ran Into the Sunlight is a a black comedy of murder and cannibalism in the English countryside. Fiftysomething Lizzie Prain has murdered Jacob, her husband of 30 years. A practical person, Lizzie knows how to carry on in disposing of the evidence: she must chop up the body and eat her husband limb by limb. The plan is to devour Jacob, tidy up the house, and move to Scotland where she resolves to live a life "structured around avoiding emotional experience at all costs." As she works, Lizzie writes notes to herself both culinary ("Resist the urge to put in a lot of garlic. Cook as normal") and practical, "(This isn't the time for oughts and shoulds"). When Lizzie encounters the much younger neighbor Tom at the local hardware store, her serene veneer starts to crack, threatening to expose her secret. Visions of Lizzie's marriage seep through her notes and give glimpses of a codependent, draining relationship, saddled with misunderstandings and regrets. If Lizzie's actions are the stuff of gruesome hyperbole, her reflections and feeling certainly aren't. The book presents an affecting account of what moving on from a failed relationship looks like, and the personal grappling it may require.