The Thick and the Lean

From the acclaimed author of The Seep, comes a provocative and astonishing new novel where three women from a strange new world seek to break free of a society that wants to constrain their attitudes to food, sex and their own bodies.

In the quaint religious town of Seagate, abstaining from food brings one closer to God.

But Beatrice Bolano is hungry. She craves the forbidden: butter, flambé, marzipan. As Seagate takes increasingly extreme measures to regulate every calorie its citizens consume, Beatrice must make a choice: give up her secret passion for cooking or leave the only community she has known.

Elsewhere, Reiko Rimando has left her modest roots for a college tech scholarship in the big city. A flawless student, she is set up for success . . . until her school pulls her funding, leaving her to face either a mountain of debt or a humiliating return home. But Reiko is done being at the mercy of the system. She forges a third path—outside of the law.

With the guidance of a mysterious cookbook written by a kitchen maid centuries ago, Beatrice and Reiko each grasp for a life of freedom—something more easily imagined than achieved in a world dominated by catastrophic corporate greed.

A startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind, Chana Porter's profound new novel explores the reclamation of pleasure as a revolutionary act.

Decadent and richly imagined, The Thick and the Lean topples expectations and skilfully re-maps vice and virtue, indulgence and shame as we know them. This book is wildly new and deliciously satisfying, and Porter is one of our moment's most original seers. Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine