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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Lionel Shriver 2013
Cover design by Stuart Bache © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007271108
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007481651
Version: 2017-04-06
To Greg—who was unfailingly, improbably glad for anything good that ever happened to me, and in the face of whose drastic, fantastic, astonishing life any fiction pales.
One in Three Would Trade Year of Life for Ideal Body
Daily Telegraph headline, 24 March 2011
Table of Contents
I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. I don’t mean celebratory dinners, good fellowship; I mean salivation, mastication, and peristalsis. Oddly, for something I do every day, I can’t remember many meals in detail, while it is far easier for me to call up favorite movies, faithful friendships, graduations. It follows, then, that film, affinity, and education are more important to me than stuffing my face. Well done, me, you say. But were I honestly to total the time I have lavished on menu planning, grocery shopping, prep and cooking, table setting, and kitchen cleanup for meal upon meal, food, one way or another, has dwarfed my fondness for Places in the Heart to an incidental footnote; ditto my fondness for any human being, even those whom