An IndieNext Pick! A Best Book of 2022 in Harper's Bazaar Daily Mail Glamour and Thrillist!
Most Anticipated of 2022 in The Millions Ms. Magazine LitHub 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. ?Absolutely
brilliant ? tragic funny eccentric and so perfectly suited to this particularly weird time.
Claire Kohda takes the vampire trope and makes it her own in a way that feels fresh and
original. Serious issues of race disability misogyny body image sexual abuse are handled
with subtlety insight and a lightness of touch. The spell this novel casts is so complete I
feel utterly and happily bitten.? -- Ruth Ozeki Booker-shortlisted author of A Tale for the
Time Being
