‘Witty, savage and poignant’ Nigella Lawson

Family dysfunction meets fine dining, in this novel about sisterhood, secrets and the things you can’t swallow down.

Matilda knows about hunger. She works in one of Sydney’s buzziest restaurants, Bocca, while suppressing her cravings, including for her celebrity chef boss, Colson. Everything in her life is tightly controlled: she allows herself one weekend a month to feast and purge, the rest of the time, she stays perfect.

Until her younger half-sister Lara crashes back into town, stirring up the family’s chaotic past and bringing long-buried secrets to the surface that threaten to disrupt Matilda’s carefully compartmentalised life.

‘Lonely mouth,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don’t know what it is. You’re looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don’t need anything at all. But you can’t tell.’

A song of abandonment, ghastly mothers, dysfunctional families, sisterhood and loss... Witty, savage and poignant -- NIGELLA LAWSON
Richly drawn, wry and utterly compelling. I devoured it in a weekend -- FELICITY CLOAKE
Read the first sentence of Jacqueline Maley’s debut novel, and you will be in it until the end. Electrifying, deeply unsettling and so, so satisfying. And, if you’ve ever tried to manage the sharp end of a career with the blunt demands of parenthood, fiercely recognisable -- MEG MASON, on The Truth About Her
Complex, gripping and beautifully realised… Maley’s debut asks some timely and necessary questions about truth, love and our responsibility to others * The Guardian, on The Truth About Her *

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers. She has also worked on staff at The Guardian in London and at The Australian Financial Review. In 2020 she won a Walkley Award for Journalism and in 2016 she won the Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist. Her previous novel, The Truth About Her, was an Australian bestseller and was shortlisted for 2022 ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. She lives in Sydney.