Published in 2022
296 pages
Sunyi Dean is a biracial autistic author who was born in Texas, grew up in Hong Kong, and now resides in North England. She writes speculative fiction with a weird slant, and has both too many books and too many children. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in places like Tor Dot Com, Aurealis, Prole, FFO, and other magazines. She also founded and cohosts the Publishing Rodeo Podcast with fellow Tor author, Scott Drakeford.
What is this book about?
Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.
Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.
But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.
