Claire Kohda

A young, mixed-race vampire must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger in this stunning debut novel from a writer-to-watch.

Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced-coffee, ice cream and cake, and foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But, Lydia can't eat any of these things. Her body doesn't work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.

Then there are the humans - the other artists at the studio space, the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men that follow her after dark, and Ben, a boyish, goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them. In her windowless studio, where she paints and studies the work of other artists, binge-watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and videos of people eating food on YouTube and Instagram, Lydia considers her place in the world. She has many of the things humans wish for - perpetual youth, near-invulnerability, immortality – but she is miserable; she is lonely; and she is hungry - always hungry.

As Lydia develops as a woman and an artist, she will learn that she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans - if she is to find a way to exist in the world. Before any of this, however, she must eat.

Woman, Eating

Seher Mohsin

Anna

But it turns out that pigs aren't naturallly dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their faeces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human.

Currently, I'm hoping to be rather than being - I'm not yet an indepent adult; I'm hoping to become one. I'm not yet an artist, I'm hoping to become one.

In those moments, I've felt more human than I ever usually do, more woman than I usually do, more defined by my shape than what's inside me.

LIMEKI 

"God wouldn't want to help a demon survivez and that's what we are, Lyds. We are unnatural, disgusting and ugly. Look at us; we're just a sin."

Mum then had reached across the table for my hands. "But it's okay," she said. "Because we are the same".

“I’d felt resentful about this fact, and disappointed. I felt like it meant that I was somehow more my mother and less my father, more demon and less human, evil and sinful before I was even born. I don’t know how a vampire pregnancy really work, though.” 

“I realized that “demon” is a subjective term, and the splitting of my identity between devil and god, between impure and pure, was something that my mom did to me, rather than the reality of my existence.” 

“Maybe my mum hated herself for not being able to hold on to her humanity; maybe she hated me for being the cause of her losing it. My mom slapped me, though, when at night while she slept, I rolled onto her side and lifted her hair to see if I could find a second mouth, and told her what I thought she might be.” 

“She’ll eventually leave this place, while the others will stay here until they die; and then, if I can afford it, I’ll move where somewhere else, and then somewhere else, while I carry on living my life apart from her.” 

“Now I wonder if I’ve been useful to her only as something she can pour everything she despise about herself into, something that she could raise to hate itself so that she’d have company in her feelings.” 

Woman, Eating quotes

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