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This debut novel is an exploration of female ambition, control, and appetite, both literal and emotional. The story centers on the main female character, known by her childhood nickname Piglet, an up-and-coming cookbook editor who has meticulously crafted a seemingly perfect upper-middle-class life in Oxford with her handsome, well-connected fiancé, Kit. With their elaborate, dream-wedding just two weeks away, and Piglet navigating pressures from her career and her future in-laws, her carefully constructed world is shattered when Kit confesses a devastating, yet undisclosed, betrayal. This moment forces Piglet to confront the gap between the life she thinks she wants and the desires she's repressed.

The approaching wedding serves as a countdown to a complete personal unraveling, with food as the medium Piglet processes her growing rage and uncertainty. Known since childhood as "the daughter who ate," Piglet’s complicated relationship with food manifests in lavish cooking for others and, in private, emotional binges on fast food as she struggles to fit into her wedding dress and conform to societal expectations. As the day of the ceremony draws closer, the pressures mount, forcing her to reckon with the class differences between her own family and Kit’s wealthy one, and ultimately, to make a dramatic choice about the marriage and the lies she has told herself to achieve her version of a perfect life.

From the publisher:

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 at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, 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. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. 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 sometimes 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 sometimes makes for us.