On Sale: Mar 30, 2027
Page Count: 256 pages
Publisher: Cardinal
ISBN-13: 9781538785010

$29.00

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A provocative novel about female bodies, friendships, and self-sacrifice, by the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Guilt

Look at her. How serene she is in her long white dress, eyes closed like a stone copy of herself. Perhaps she lives on air…

Dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job, estranged from her parents, Hazel Whitlock signs up for a sideshow act at the Blackpool seaside resort: she’ll play the Starving Bride. 

On display in the iconic Blackpool Tower, with a ravenous lion prowling the enclosure, Hazel must lie in silence while spectators pass judgement on her body. Time compresses and warps in this strange space, and the past returns to Hazel with full and shocking force, making her relive the defining, shameful incident of her youth.

As the days tick down and Hazel’s shrinking frame draws ever larger crowds, her old friend Gilda becomes increasingly worried for her welfare, while local councilman Frank Marsh warns that the tower could collapse at any minute. No one will listen—not even his daughter, obsessed with the bride inside.

One of New Zealand’s most celebrated novelists returns with this unsettling dissection of the appetites we hide, the ones we perform, and the price we pay to pretend.

Genre:

Fiction World Literature England 21st Century

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novels The Wish Child and The Axeman’s Carnival both won the Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.