Eating Mammals: Three Novellas

In the tradition of T. C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, and Michel Faber—with a penchant for the macabre worthy of Irvine Welsh—comes Eating Mammals.Gypsies, businessmen, servants, masters, and unwise children come together in three mythical tales from Victorian England. Eating Mammals evokes a lost time and place in which the realm of the magical seems almost too possible: a winged cat wreaks havoc in a Yorkshire workhouse and then in the minds of a succession of owners; a famed stunt eater introduces his apprentice, Captain Gusto, to the delicate art of devouring anything for a living; a blooming romance between two meat-pie makers leads thirty-two adorned donkeys to the altar. Wholly original and as assured as folklore, Eating Mammals marks the arrival of a very distinctive new voice.