The Glutton: A Novel

by A.K. Blakemore

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Historical fiction that will transport you, The Glutton is satisfyingly atmospheric and builds around a core question of the necessity of love and companionship. Brilliantly written with prose that will make you forget you’re even reading, this is a gorgeous novel that resonates on so many levels.

A New York Times EDITORS’ CHOICE | Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize | MOST ANTICIPATED by The Guardian • Paste Magazine • LitHub • The Millions • Library Journal

From the prizewinning author of The Manningtree Witches, a subversive historical novel set during the French Revolution, inspired by a young peasant boy turned showman, said to have been tormented and driven to murder by an all-consuming appetite.

“Obscenely beautiful...Every sentence is gorgeous...Powerful and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review

“This year, I found myself seeking one quality above all others from the books I read: escapism. And no book plunged me into another world quite so bracingly as The Glutton.” —Vogue

1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite...an appetite they say tortures him still.

Born in an impoverished village to a widowed young mother, Tarare was once overflowing with quiet affection: for the Baby Jesus and the many Saints, for his mother, for the plants and little creatures in the woods and fields around their house. He spends his days alone, observing the delicate charms of the countryside. But his world is not a gentle one—and soon, life as he knew it is violently upended. Tarare is pitched down a chaotic path through revolutionary France, left to the mercy of strangers, and increasingly, bottomlessly, ravenous.

This exhilarating, disquieting novel paints a richly imagined life for The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon in 18th-century France: a world of desire, hunger and poverty; hope, chaos and survival. As in her cult hit The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore showcases her stunning lyricism and deep compassion for characters pushed to the edge of society in The Glutton, her most unputdownable work yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668030622
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	18,206
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

A.K. Blakemore is the author of two collections of poetry: Humbert Summer and Fondue. She has also translated the work of Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo. Her poetry and prose writing have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The London Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Manningtree Witches won the Desmond Elliot Prize 2021. She lives in London, England.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/14/2023

Set in the last turbulent decades of the 18th century, Blakemore’s savory second novel (after The Manningtree Witches) is loosely based on the life of the Great Tarare, a French peasant renowned for his insatiable hunger. The story begins with Tarare chained to a hospital bed near Versailles, recounting his story to an incredulous nun named Sister Perpetué. Born in 1772 near Lyon, 17-year-old Tarare escapes after being beaten and left for dead by his mother’s salt-smuggling lover Nollet. He begins a new life with a band of traveling entertainers, whose enterprising leader capitalizes on Tarare’s talent for devouring anything and everything: “Trotters and snouts, sod and corks, snakes and rats, mice white and browning and throbbing in mute terror as they are dangled by their tails above the mouth, scrabbling their tiny person-like hands uselessly.” Tarare performs for an increasingly rebellious peasantry, who maraud throughout the countryside smearing human waste on the wrecked walls of abandoned chateaux. As war ravages Europe, Tarare becomes a soldier and a spy and ends up in the care of two doctors—one benevolent, the other cruel. When a child disappears, perhaps devoured by someone or something, Tarare vanishes. Atmospherically charged and written in eloquent and compassionate prose, this is a lusty feast. Agent: Anna Watkins, United Agents. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Graham Halstead meets the complex narration challenge posed by this audiobook. His performance provides the perfect mix of empathy and horror. Blakemore's work is a deeply literary journey based on a real historical figure. In the time of the French Revolution, Tarare is forced out of his home; eventually he joins a circus, where he becomes a freak attraction for his ability to eat high volumes of food--or anything else. Halstead's performance connects with literary prose that fleshes out the time and place, and provides listeners with a kind of lyrical rhythm. His voice captures the beauty and heartbreak in the story's grotesque events. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2024 - AudioFile

2023-08-12
A young peasant boy’s ferocious appetite fascinates and repulses his French countrymen during the revolution.

Tarare is born in 1772 to a young unwed woman and, years later, he is dying while shackled to a hospital bed with only a nun for company, as rumors abound that he’s a cannibal. How his life took such a tragic and grotesque turn is the crux of this novel, which breathes life into the mythology surrounding a real historical figure. Tarare is naïve as a child and limited in intelligence as a teenager, but he’s deeply devoted to his mother; then his stepfather almost beats him to death after he makes an inadvertent slip to a friend about the man’s smuggling business. Forced to flee, Tarare falls in with a band of vagrants headed to Paris and develops a voracious appetite, which their savvy leader quickly turns into a street performance, encouraging Tarare to eat corks, animal corpses, and buckets of entrails. After the group dissolves, Tarare joins the military in hopes of being fed, but his appetite lands him in a hospital, where doctors are fascinated by him but also suggest he might be useful to the battle against the Prussians as a spy who can swallow missives. In Blakemore’s second historical novel, following The Manningtree Witches (2021), she vividly and compassionately imagines the misery of being the Glutton of Lyon and deftly questions what terrible appetites develop when people are denied love and a place in the world: “Sometimes he worries that hunger is all he is....It is in this moment, with the delicate cruciform shadow of the church’s weathervane grazing at the toe of his shoe, that Tarare realises he faces down an existence of unrelenting, insatiable want. Of eternal suffering. That a void opened up underneath him when it opened up within him.” In Blakemore’s skilled hands, Tarare becomes complex and fully human rather than an abject horror and historical footnote.

Visceral and haunting.

Kirkus Reviews

Obscenely beautiful...Powerful and provocative.”—The New York Times Book Review

"Utterly gripping... Just as immersive and vividly realized as any work of science fiction or fantasy—and a lot more gory."—Vogue

"There are few writers who can be truly likened to Hilary Mantel, but Blakemore is one."—The Observer

"One of the best books of the year."—The Guardian

"Blakemore takes Tarare’s life, recorded only in a medical paper, and puts the meat on the bones... what meat it is."—Evening Standard

"Rivetingly inserting itself into the blanks of the historical record, this is a smart, endlessly stylish novel, glinting with sly intelligence and humour."—Daily Mail

"Blakemore's writing is exceptional, saturated with the viscera of this life."—The Telegraph

"[The Glutton] has the most visceral, haunting, and downright disturbing historical premises we’ve seen in a while."—Paste (most anticipated)

"The great gift of this novel is that Blakemore somehow never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare... The Glutton a stunning, mesmeric novel of uncommon power."—BookPage (starred review)

"Atmospherically charged and written in eloquent and compassionate prose, this is a lusty feast."—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"[Blakemore] deftly questions what terrible appetites develop when people are denied love and a place in the world... Viseral and haunting."—Kirkus

"Gorgeous and brutal, striking and wise, The Glutton is, at its core, a rich story of the lengths we will go to find belonging... Absolutely outstanding."—Chelsea Bieker, author of Heartbroke

"An embarrassment of riches. A sensory assault fit to slap any reader awake."—Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Dance Tree

"The Glutton contains some of the most striking writing I have read in a very long time."—Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass

"The Glutton is an extraordinary accomplishment, a truly horrible and truly glorious novel. I devoured it."—Annie Garthwaite, author of Cecily

From the Publisher