Piglet: A Novel

by Lottie Hazell

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We love juicy, voice driven novels like Piglet. Taut and propulsive, this is a story of a relationship going off the rails and a woman seeking to find fulfillment at any cost.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR 2024 “BOOKS WE LOVE”

“If I owned a bookstore, I’d hand-sell Piglet to everyone.”

—Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review

A "sensuous" (The New Yorker) debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor, she’s got lovely friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she (mostly) likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly . . . hungry. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life makes for us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798885797320
Publisher:	Gale, A Cengage Group
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	423
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lottie Hazell is a writer, contemporary literature scholar, and board game designer living in Warwickshire, England. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Loughborough University, where she studied food writing in twenty-first century fiction. Piglet is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

2023-12-16
An addictive novel about a London cookbook editor whose life veers off course weeks before her wedding.

Piglet, the narrator of Hazell’s debut novel, seems to have it all: a good job, a new house, fancy cookware and boundless energy for whipping up perfect meals, and a fiance whose upper-crust family promises to whisk her away from her middle-class upbringing. However, Piglet’s false modesty and her fiance Kit’s lavish toast to her, “the cause of every good thing I have in my life,” set off alarm bells by the end of the first chapter. An italicized note before the start of the next chapter amplifies that unease by letting us know Kit is going to tell Piglet something damaging—we don’t know what—13 days before their wedding. Kit’s betrayal drives the novel forward in an unexpected way. Hazell’s choice to withhold a crucial bit of information won’t bother some readers, while others will feel like the book is a recipe with a vital ingredient missing. The novel teases out the ways Piglet betrays herself long before Kit’s confession and how she rages against the conventions of femininity and bourgeois restraint afterwards. The result is some seriously brilliant cringe. When Piglet wanders into an Indian restaurant by herself and orders every dish on the menu days before her wedding-dress fitting, it’s hard not to squirm, and harder still to avoid interrogating the reasons for one’s intense discomfort. The effect is similar when Piglet goes around telling everyone, including Kit’s family and hers, his big secret. Hazell balances these quasi-comedic moments with quieter ones to keep Piglet real. Her shame about her parents is poignant, especially because they really love her. “We’re proud of you, Piglet,” her father says. “I know that doesn’t mean much from your old dad back in Derby….” Like the food that Piglet cooks, Hazell’s sentences are delicious. The lowly lentil, for example, has never looked so exciting, blooming in broth before Piglet hears “the angry, thumping hiss of something catching on cast iron.”

A novel that you will devour first and savor later.

Kirkus Reviews