Coming Soon

By Catherine Chidgey

On Sale: Mar 30, 2027
Page Count: 240 pages
Publisher: Cardinal
ISBN-13: 9781538785034

$14.99

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A provocative novel about female bodies, friendships, and self-sacrifice, by the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Guilt

Look at her. How serene she is in her long white dress, eyes closed like a stone copy of herself. Perhaps she lives on air…

Dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job, estranged from her parents, Hazel Whitlock signs up for a sideshow act at the Blackpool seaside resort: she’ll play the Starving Bride. 

On display in the iconic Blackpool Tower, with a ravenous lion prowling the enclosure, Hazel must lie in silence while spectators pass judgement on her body. Time compresses and warps in this strange space, and the past returns to Hazel with full and shocking force, making her relive the defining, shameful incident of her youth.

As the days tick down and Hazel’s shrinking frame draws ever larger crowds, her old friend Gilda becomes increasingly worried for her welfare, while local councilman Frank Marsh warns that the tower could collapse at any minute. No one will listen—not even his daughter, obsessed with the bride inside.

One of New Zealand’s most celebrated novelists returns with this unsettling dissection of the appetites we hide, the ones we perform, and the price we pay to pretend.

Genre:

Fiction World Literature England 21st Century

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novels The Wish Child and The Axeman’s Carnival both won the Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.

“One of the unspoken truths of disaster is how it lodges in our bodies. Rising temperatures, fires, the constant susurration of impending collapse are not just out there, they are in here as well, in the form of toxins and particles, cortisol and trauma, anxiety and alienation. New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey’s new novel, The Starving Bride, takes this understanding and makes it powerfully tangible. It interweaves climate anxiety and the derangements of body culture with deeply disquieting results.”
The Saturday Paper (AUS)
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF GUILT
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“Epically imagined, intricately constructed, conceptually engaging and packed with perfectly timed revelations.”
New York Times Book Review
“A singular story that lingers, and burrows into the darker corners of childhood, surveillance, and what it means to truly see, or be seen. The result is a novel of conscience and consequence: quietly devastating, fiercely intelligent, and unforgettable.”
The Irish Times