Woman, Eating

In this stunning first book by a writer to watch, a young, mixed-race vampire must learn to reconcile her deep-seated yearning to live among people with her never-ending hunger.

Lydia needs to eat. She's always desired to sample Japanese cuisine. Her father was Japanese, and his favorite foods were sashimi, ramen, and onigiri with sour plums inside. Then there's ice cream and cake, iced tea and bubble tea, and the veggies produced by the other young artists in the London studio space she's surreptitiously squatting in, along with foraged herbs and plants. But none of them are edible for Lydia. Her body functions differently from other people's. She can only digest blood, and finding fresh pig blood in London, where she is living independently of her vampire mother for the first time, proves to be much more challenging than she had imagined.

Then there are the people: Ben, a boyish, goofy-grinned artist she is starting to feel something for, the other artists at the studio space, the patrons of the gallery she works as an intern at, the odd males who stalk her after dark. Even though Lydia is aware that they are her natural prey, she finds it difficult to consume them. Lydia thinks about her role in the world in her windowless studio, where she paints, analyzes the work of other artists, and watches endless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and food-related videos on YouTube and Instagram. She has many of the things that people aspire to—perpetual youth, almost complete invulnerability, immortality—but she is also sad, lonely, and always hungry.

Lydia will discover as she grows as a woman and an artist that, in order to survive in the world, she must resolve the tensions inside her—between her human and demon sides, her mixed ethnic background, and her connection with food and, by extension, other people. She has to eat first, however, before any of this.