Sunyi Dean

Sunyi Dean's The Book Eaters is a contemporary fantasy debut. It's a story of motherhood, sacrifice, and hope; of queer identity and learning to accept who you are; of gilded lies and the danger of believing the narratives others create for you. 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 fairytales 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.

The Book Eaters

Elizabeth Denny

 "You'd eat the whole world to help me out and I think I'd do that for you. too. Youre my monster and I'm yours, and even though I'm sad you lied to me and l'm sorry that we have to hurt more people, we must go together because we are a monster family."

Amanda Autumn Berrey

These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream.

“You’re home again,” he said, and she suppressed a wince. He spoke with the vicar’s inflection, used the same elongated vowels. These little changes threw her every time. Every victim.

without feeding, the madness would set in, whittling away at his fragile psyche.

There was a kind of peace in surrender. Though it shamed her, a part of Devon embraced the relief of simply giving up.

Even in the happiest fairy tales, princesses did not usually have much choice.

Jodie Reads

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. -C. S. Lewis, note to his goddaughter

Jasper

These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter.

'Everyone is a monster to somebody.' Devon didn't have to think for this answer; she'd prepared it long ago, in readiness. 'But you are not, and never will be, a monster to me.'

The worst and best lie she'd ever told him.

'Yes, of course,' Devon said, fumbling for polite words. Didn't he feel it--the power, the trauma, the awe? Why hadn't the axis of his universe tilted, as hers had?

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