Piglet
A Novel

Name: Piglet
Brand: Macmillan Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Lottie Hazell
ISBN: 9781250332325

Author: Lottie Hazell

Narrator: Rebekah Hinds

Unabridged: 7 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Published: 02/27/2024

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Literary Fiction, Absurdist

Synopsis

"Hinds’ depiction of Piglet’s frantic appetite is piercing, capturing her insatiable need for the lushly described food. This is a listen like slightly burnt caramel—sharp and dark, yet still luscious."—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

About Lottie Hazell

Lottie Hazell is a writer, contemporary literature scholar, and board game designer living in Warwickshire, England. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Loughborough University, where she studied food writing in twenty-first century fiction. Piglet is her first novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on May 10, 2024

eating disorder fiction is just so boring. much like having one! there is nothing new or interesting about disordered eating, which at its core is unable to shake off the embedded falsehood that women should be small or should deny themselves. these stories can try to be new or interesting, but they'......more

Goodreads review by Lark on September 03, 2024

This remarkable story is told almost entirely through 1) dialogue and 2) descriptions of food. I think it shouldn't work, but it does. I was rapt. The protagonist's attention to food, her relationship with food, her history of covering for her anorexic sister, the class divides between two families,......more

Goodreads review by Letitia on February 18, 2024

First things first, this is not a bad book. So please don't mistake my rating as that interpretation. I genuinely try to make the distinction between a book being "bad" and just not being compatible with the reader. Reading is very personal so just because a book might not work/be compatible for me......more

Goodreads review by Candi on March 17, 2024

I kept thinking of that old expression “out of the frying pan, into the fire” while reading this novel. It’s rather fitting on a couple of levels. Not only does Piglet seem to be getting herself out of one bad situation and into another, but the food metaphors abound in this book as well. When we me......more

Goodreads review by Terrie on May 04, 2024

Piglet by Lottie Hazell is a Literary Fiction Debut Novel! The main character, Piglet, has carefully recreated herself around her relationship with Kit, the man she will be marrying in 98 days. She has a new home in one of the best areas, a wonderful job as a cookbook editor, and prepares great meals......more

Quotes

“Some seriously brilliant cringe. When Piglet wanders into an Indian restaurant by herself and orders every dish on the menu days before her wedding-dress fitting, it’s hard not to squirm, and harder still to avoid interrogating the reasons for one’s intense discomfort . . . Like the food that Piglet cooks, Hazell’s sentences are delicious. . . A novel that you will devour first and savor later.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Hazell debuts with the delicious narrative of a disastrous wedding.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Ambitious prose Nora Ephron would be proud of. Hazell captures the subtle class divide in contemporary British life with precision—all while serving the reader a bacchanal of delicious food writing that will have you craving more.”
—Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

“Piglet is luscious and disturbing and propulsive, and I completely devoured it. It’s a book about hunger and secrecy and women made small by convention. And it’s a book that tears at the surface of things to reveal the vast, messy truth of a body with a beating heart.”
—Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things

“It takes audacity and all kinds of courage to produce a novel as ferocious and weird as Piglet. The narrative accelerates like nothing else I’ve read, opening onto dead-end domestic conformity and then driving us all the way out into the wildernesses, where the possibility for liberation and the fulfillment of desires might be discovered. It made me so hungry.”
—Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear

“This book! Visceral, brilliantly dark, and so smart. An object lesson in how our relentless pursuit of a tickbox life will never make us happy. Characters that pop, writing you could eat.”
—Fran Littlewood, New York Times Bestselling author of Amazing Grace Adams

Awards

New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
NPR Best Book of the Year